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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...

Increasingly often, cable channels include repeat broadcasts of old programmes in their programming. This poses the problem of the re-use of these works in terms of copyright and royalties payable to the performers. Between 1974 and 1981, the channel TF1 broadcast a television series called "L'île aux enfants". Some of the sketches in this programme were written in collaboration with one of the actors in the series. Noting in 1993 that the company Canal J was re-broadcasting episodes of "L'île aux enfants" by cable and satellite without first having obtained their authorisation, the applicants,...

Adopted specifically in order to transpose the "Television without Frontiers" Directive into French law, the Act of 1 August 2000 (see IRIS 2000-8: 7) introduces an Article 20-2 into the Audio-visual Communication Act of 30 September 1986, which provides that: "Events of major importance may not be broadcast exclusively in such a way that deprives a significant proportion of the public of the possibility of following the events in a live or recorded broadcast on a freely accessible television service. The list of events of major importance is to be fixed by decree of the Conseil d'État. The decree...

A decision taken on 13 February 2001 by the Conseil de la concurrence (the French Council on Competition) in a case brought to its attention by CANAL+ dealt with the practice of market share discounts operated by the company TF1 during the period 1994/1997 concerning the sale of advertising space on television. This practice involves allowing specific reductions to advertisers whose proportion of advertising expenditure on TF1 is greater than the channel's share of the television advertising market. Referring to a previous decision (18 June 1996) and to the decision of the European Commission on...

Under Article L 311-1 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle (French Intellectual Property Code - CPI), introduced by the Act of 3 July 1985, the authors and performers of works fixed on phonograms and videograms are entitled to receive remuneration if their works are reproduced for private use. The Private Copy Commission, instituted by Article L 311-5 of the CPI, is responsible for determining the level of this remuneration and how it is to be paid, according to the type of support and the duration of the recording on it. The amount is normally paid by the manufacturers or importers of recording...