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As the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (French regulatory body - CSA) agreed at the end of last year to the possibility of renewing the authorisation issued to the channel CANAL+ (an encrypted pay-television service broadcast terrestrially) for a further five years, the channel and the CSA had to negotiate a new agreement setting out the rules applicable to the channel. This was finalised on 29 May. The agreement currently in force has been amended on several points, particularly as regards news ethics and the protection of children and young people. In view of the growing proportion of the...

The Court of Cassation has rejected the appeal lodged by CANAL+ against the judgment delivered against it by the Monopolies Board, upheld by the Court of Appeal in Paris, on abuse of its dominant position in the market for the television rights for broadcasting cinema films (see IRIS 1999-2: 7 and IRIS 1999-7: 8). CANAL+ pre-purchases 80% of the rights for broadcasting full-length film productions of French origin. This financing goes hand-inhand with a clause reserving exclusive broadcasting rights for the films by a pay-TV channel for one year following the twelve months after its first showing...

On 18 April 2000 the Court of Cassation rejected the appeal lodged by France Télécom in the dispute between the "incumbent operator" and the cable television networks operator Numéricâble. The company is a concessionaire of local authorities and broadcasts audiovisual services on a cable network owned by France Télécom. The incumbent operator notified the company of a substantial increase in the cost of access to its network for the transport of audiovisual signals by cable at the time of renewing current contracts. Invoking the serious worsening of the financial straits that would result from...

The Internet host Altern.org has again been sanctioned by the courts, this time - following the Estelle Hallyday case (see IRIS 1999-3: 3), in which it was found that access providers were liable for the circulation of unlawful content - for counterfeiting a brand-name and infringement of copyright. In the present case, there was a site devoted to sadomasochism at Altern.org under the domain name of calimero.org. The site's home-page contained the heading la page francophone de Caliméro ("Caliméro's page in French") and in the centre of the screen an exact reproduction of the character in the Caliméro...

Following on from the Court of Appeal in Versailles last November (see IRIS 2000-1: 13), the Court of Appeal in Paris has recently pronounced in its turn on the legal status of a multimedia work, in this case a number of CD-ROMs on painting and literature. The dispute was between a company that edits CD-ROMs (Havas Interactive) and the designer and producer of seven CD-ROMs edited by the company (Mr Casaril). According to the contracts concluded by the parties, only the editing company held copyright. The producer was classified as an "independent service provider" and received a lump-sum remuneration...