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Current events connected with the posting of disputed messages on the Internet could well force Parliament to make a decision on whether the 1881 Act - and more specifically the three-month prescriptive period referred to in Article 65 of the Act - applies to the web. The Court of Appeal in Paris set the ball rolling on 15 December 1999 by deciding that, on the Internet, the offence of defamation was continuous and that the prescriptive period referred to in Article 65 was never intended to apply to the web. On the other hand, the same court decided on 23 June 2000 that the threemonth prescriptive...

The purpose of media chronology is to establish a minimum period between showing a feature film in a cinema and using it in other ways, particularly in video form. Thus, in compliance with Article 1 of the Decree of 4 January 1983, no feature film shown in a cinema may be used in the form of supports intended for sale or rental for private use by the public, particularly in the form of video cassettes and video discs, within a period of one year from the issue of the authorisation of exploitation. It is accepted that this provision should apply to the DVDs currently available commercially. In practice,...

The judgment delivered on 28 September 2000 by the Court of Appeal in Versailles will add further fuel to the debate which has been going on for a number of years on the scope of the legal licence for using commercial phonograms. In the initial proceedings (see IRIS 1998-2: 6), the Regional Court in Nanterre delivered a judgment in this case between the musician Johnny Clegg and his producers, and the company TF1 on 5 November 1997. At the same time, the Court of Appeal in Paris had already delivered a judgment in another case involving the same occurrences and had found the television company...

For the first time to our knowledge, the Courts have pronounced on the legal status of e-mail correspondence. The dispute was between a research student in a laboratory, and the director and two IT network administrators at the laboratory, charged with having violated the privacy of correspondence by reading the student's e-mail correspondence without his knowledge. The defendants claimed that e-mail messages could not have the benefit of the rules of confidentiality enjoyed by postal correspondence since these messages, which were unencrypted, were entrusted to intermediary servers which carried...

In response to a claim brought by a consumer protection association, the company Canal Satellite (which markets a range of services and broadcasts digital television channels by satellite to its subscribers) has been ordered by the Regional Court of Paris to delete a number of clauses which were considered abusive from its subscription contract. According to the terms of Article L 132-1 of the Consumer Protection Code, clauses in contracts concluded between professionals and non-professionals or consumers are deemed to be abusive if their purpose or effect is to create a significant imbalance to...