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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...

The question of the scope of legal licence, i.e. cases where the use of a commercial phonogram does not require the authorisation of the producer and the performer, is currently under debate before a number of courts in France. These cases are listed in Article L 214-1 of the French Intellectual Property Code (CPI), which states that «where a phonogram has been published for commercial purposes, the performer and the producer may not object to: 1. its direct communication in a public place, as long as it is not used as part of a show, or 2. its broadcast or the simultaneous distribution in full...