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The ownership of audiovisual rights for sports events and competitions is regulated in France by Article 181 of the Act of 16 July 1984 as amended by the Act of 1 August 2003, according to which "The federations [...] and the organisers [...] own the right to exploit the sports events or competitions they organise." The Decree of 15 July 2004 has now laid down the procedure for the professional leagues to commercialise their audiovisual rights. The text gives them exclusive rights for the commercialisation of all the rights for audiovisual exploitation and broadcasting, either live or recorded...

Last December, when his Ministry's budget was adopted, the Minister for Communications announced that a working party was to be set up to look into redefining the methods for establishing and collecting this fee, which is the main source of financing for public-sector audiovisual services (see IRIS 2003-7: 8). The aim is to improve on its yield, increasing the EUR 2 billion it produces and combating fraud. On 25 July, the Government adopted the principle of combining collection of the television licence fee with that of the housing tax, starting next year. Housing does indeed correlate to some...

On 4 June the Court of Appeal found Claude Zidi, co-author of the screenplay of the film "La Totale", and James Cameron, author of its American adaptation "True Lies", guilty of infringing copyright. The original proceedings had been brought on the grounds of infringement of copyright by Lucien Lambert, author of a scenario entitled "Émilie", completed in 1981, which was adapted for the theatre then translated and published in an American version, who noted a number of similarities between the screenplays of the films in question and his own scenario. In the initial proceedings, the Court had...

On 2 June the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (audiovisual regulatory authority ­ CSA) published the text of its response to the proposals made by the direction du développement des médias (directorate of media development ­ DDM) and the Centre national de la cinématographie (national cinematographic centre ­ CNC) on changes in the definition of what constitutes an audiovisual work. The case of "Popstars" had pointed to the need for a reform, and the DDM and the CNC had submitted four areas for consideration to the CSA last March (see IRIS 2004-5: 12). After carrying out a thorough analysis...

On 10 June the Constitutional Council published its decision on the provisions of the Act on Confidence in the Digital Economy (LCEN) which had been referred to it three weeks earlier (see IRIS 2004-6: 11). The first dispute concerned e-mail, defined in Article 1(IV) of the Act as "any message in the form of text, voice, sound or image sent via a public communication network and stored in a network server or in the addressee's hardware until it is recovered by the addressee". The Council held that this provision merely defined a technical process and could not affect the legal scheme covering private...