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The concept of the now famous television programme "Big Brother", which first appeared in the Netherlands in September 1999 and has since spawned other programmes in both the United States and Europe, has been taken up in France by the terrestrially-broadcast Hertzian channel M6, which has just launched the programme "Loft Story". This first broadcast by Real TV in France proposes to following in real time the lives of 11 single people (6 young men and 5 young women) who have agree to being filmed twenty-four hours a day for seventy days, corresponding to a period of flat-sharing in a loft. The...

The distribution of many phonograms is often promoted by means of a video clip that adapts the soundtrack of the original phonogram to visual images. These video clips are entirely dependent on the exploitation of the original sound work, and a recent decision by the court of cassation has now set out in detail the conditions for producing video clips. In the case in question, the performing musicians and their representatives claimed that video clips could not be produced without their authorisation as this constituted a secondary use of their performances. On the other hand, the producers of...

As the number of French homes wanting to obtain Internet access is increasing constantly, access providers regularly make ever more competitive connection offers to meet the large-scale demand. Thus, during the summer of 2000, the company AOL advertised an offer, valid for several months, of unlimited Internet access for FRF 99.00 per month, inclusive of access and phone time. The offer was very successful, rapidly generating not only a large number of new subscriptions but also, as a result, connection problems that were widely reported in the press and acknowledged openly by the access provider....

An order in an urgent matter at the regional court in Paris on 6 February has shed more light on the application of the Act of 1 August 2000 on rendering hosts liable. A company and its manager who had been the subject of defamatory and slanderous messages on an Internet site that was also unlawfully using the company's name as its domain name, had applied to the courts for an urgent order requiring the site's host to make such dissemination impossible. They also wanted the host to communicate to them the information and computer data in its possession so that the creators of the disputed site...

Following two decisions that aroused a great deal of debate, in which judges found that on-line press offences constituted a continuous offence (IRIS 2001-1: 13), the court of cassation has at last stated its position on the much-discussed matter of the application of the threemonth prescription of Article 65 of the 1881 Act to this type of offence. "Press" offences (such as defamation and slander) lapse a full three months after either the date on which they are committed or the date on which the public becomes aware of them, and some judges had felt that the specific nature of the Internet transformed...