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Article 48 of the Act of 30 September 1986 (as amended) provides that terms of reference fixed by decree should define the legal framework for the operations and obligations of the two national television companies. A decree of 31 December 1999 has now approved the amendments to the terms of reference for France 2 and France 3, originally defined in 1994 and already amended in 1996 and 1998 (see IRIS 1998-6: 10). On 15 December the official audiovisual monitoring body (Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel - CSA), to which the matter was referred in application of Article 48 of the 1986 act (as amended),...

There is much debate, in terms of both case law and legal opinion, concerning the classification of a multimedia work for the purposes of copyright in France. A decision by the Court of Appeal in Versailles recently refused to classify a CD-ROM of an interactive video game as an audiovisual work, upholding a judgment delivered by the Regional Court in Nanterre on 26 November 1997 which attracted a lot of attention at the time. Articles L112-2 6 and 113-7 of the Intellectual Property Code (CPI) define an audiovisual work as "any animated sequence of images" and assimilate it to a work of collaboration....

On 9 December last year the Court of Appeal in Lyon upheld the judgment delivered by the Regional Court (TGI) in Lyon last summer which declared the company editing the daily newspaper Le Progrès guilty of forgery for having, without the specific prior agreement of its salaried journalists, additionally published their articles on Internet (see IRIS 1999-9: 4). This was the first time an appeal court deliberated on the merits of the widely-discussed subject of the copyright rights of journalists in the event of the publication of their works on Internet. The company Groupe Progrès, considering...

The Regional Court (TGI) in Nanterre has just added a new nugget in the debate on the liability of Internet hosts. In a case on which judgment was delivered on 8 December, the solution adopted by the judges has already aroused applause on the one hand and severe criticism on the other. Once again the case involved a model prohibiting the publication on Internet sites of photographs of her in which she appeared partly or totally unclothed. In its judgment in favour of the model, the Court began by referring to the absolute right of any individual in respect of personal portrayal, which entitled...

The appearance of digital recorders making it possible to produce copies of audio CDs or CD-ROMs which are perfectly identical to the original on low-cost supports increases the risk of the work of creative artistes being copied. After the Regional Court in Valence on 2 July, it was the turn of the Regional Court in Clermont-Ferrand to find against the manager of a free access CD writer shop for forgery. The shop made available to its customers, equipment for copying CDs and a computer used for personalising inlays. Having been informed of this situation by a television programme, the Public Prosecutor...