The Protection of minors in a converged media environment: Free-to-download IRIS plus Report

posted on 11 June, 2015 (public)

The Protection of minors in a converged media environment: Free-to-download IRIS plus Report

The European Audiovisual Observatory has just published an IRIS plus Report on the Protection of minors in a converged media environment as a free-to-download PDF.

After some facts and figures on media consumption by children in Europe, the report explains the international and European legal frameworks which aims at protecting minors from harmful media content. Moving on to national implementation in the EU member states, the report gets down to the major differences of approach in Europe. The report then provides specific national examples of self and co-regulatory instruments as applied to audiovisual media services before looking at services outside the scope of the AVMSD. Current case law and interpretative issues concerning the protection of minors are then analysed, with recent national examples. The last section is dedicated to the state of play of the decision-making process. Considering the multi-screen environment in which young people consume content, it is clear that the current disparities in legislation for the various channels no longer suffice to offer a real protection across the board for harmful content. And this is one of the challenges facing the REFIT exercise.

An extensive annotated bibliography complete with links to all reference texts accompanies this publication. The texts of reference are organised by organisation and include the most recently published reports and articles, including those issued by the European Audiovisual Observatory and by the EPRA. Case law of interest is also provided, both of the CJEU and of national courts.

A workshop organised in December last year in Strasbourg between the Observatory and the EPRA formed the basis for the reflections which can be found in this report.