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The bills for reforming the public-sector audiovisual scene have provoked stormy discussions in the National Assembly. Being fewer in number, the opposition MPs firmly opposed to the bill as prepared and drafted by the parliamentary majority had no choice but to table hundreds of amendments in order to delay voting, hoping thereby to cause the reform to fail. In view of the delay caused by examination of the bill in the National Assembly, the Government made the surprising decision not to wait for Parliament’s vote before applying the key measure in the reform - the abolition of advertising. The...

The 2009 Finance Act has created a new tax incentive aimed at attracting foreign productions and co-productions to France. Directed at both cinema and audiovisual works, the arrangement will be to the advantage of executive producers liable for French company tax for their fictional and animated works meeting three cumulative conditions: they must be ineligible for financial support for production, their dramatic content must include elements relating to French culture, heritage or territory, and they must have eligible expenditure of at least EUR one million euro; for fictional works there is...

Grégory Lemarchal was a singer who became famous both for winning a reality TV programme and for the disease that killed him - despite the doubts expressed for a long time as to its nature - cystic fibrosis. During one of his sketches, a humorous commentator on a television programme who habitually renames celebrities by referring to them by a word that is supposed to sum them up chose “cystic fibrosis” to refer to Gregory Lemarchal, using the name of the disease in place of the name of the person each time it came up in a phrase. The commentator was prosecuted on the basis of a totally new infringement...

In France, authors enjoy the right to respect for their name, their status and their work. This right is perpetual, inalienable and not subject to limitation. It is transmitted to his successors on the death of the author (Art. L. 121-1 of the Intellectual Property Code). It is on the basis of infringement of the moral right of his predecessor that Victor Hugo’s heir lost his appeal against the author and editor of two sequels to Les Misérables . He claimed that these novels spoiled the famous writer’s work - the social context in which their action takes place is substantially different from that...

The presenter of TF1’s 1 o’clock news has been sued for public libel by the French society for the defence of tradition, family and property (TFP). When presenting a news item on the annual report of the inter-ministerial mission for vigilance and combating sects (Miviludes), the newscaster described as fraud the commercial practices of an association acknowledged in the report as being a sect, the name of which was revealed in the report that followed. The court in Paris had no difficulty in recognising that this constituted libel, which is defined in Article 29 of the Freedom of the Press Act...