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On 30 November 2011, the audiovisual regulatory authority (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel - CSA), after obtaining the opinion of the Constitutional Council, adopted a recommendation on the election of the French President, which is to be held on 22 April and 6 May 2012. Under Article 1 of the Act of 30 September 1986, the CSA is responsible for ensuring “observance (…) of the pluralist nature of the expression of currents of thinking and opinion”; Article 16 requires it to adopt a recommendation and to define if necessary the conditions for the production and programming of broadcasts as part...

A company, currently in enforced liquidation, that made available to the public a free on-line digital recording service allowing the downloading of the programmes of the 18 national DTV channels to the service user’s computer, was summoned to appear in court to answer claims of infringement of copyright by a number of these channels, who were holders of intellectual property rights in respect of the programmes. In the initial proceedings, the regional court had allowed their claims and pronounced measures banning the downloading of the programmes at issue. In support of its appeal, the company...

In a judgment of 25 October 2011, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that claims arising from breaches of personality rights on the internet can also be brought before courts of a member state in which the person concerned has his or her “centre of interests”. It also held that the nature of Article 3 of the E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EG) was not such that it required transposition in the form of a specific conflict-of-laws rule. Both the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris (Paris Regional Court) (Case C-161/10) and the Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice) (Case C-509/09)...

On 18 November 2011, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced during a forum on culture in the digital era his desire to extend the fight to combat illegal downloading to the streaming of musical and audiovisual works. “If technology allows us further evolution, then the law will be adapted,” he said. It should be recalled that the Decree of 5 March 2010 authorising the HADOPI to process the data transmitted to it by rightsholders and access providers currently only refers to peer-to-peer activity. As a result, and despite the fact that it is increasingly frequent, the HADOPI does not currently...

After two years of work, the nationwide switch to DTV in France was completed on 29 November 2011. The result is a complete end to analog terrestrial broadcasting - “not an end, but a beginning”, according to one member of the CSA, referring to the “irresistible advent of connected television, which will make television and the Internet coexist on the same screen”. The combination of audiovisual content, which is heavily regulated, and content from the Internet, which is not regulated, indeed raises new questions concerning regulation. How will it be possible, for example, to protect young people...