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The Grand Chamber has overruled an earlier finding of non-violation of the right to freedom of expression of a lawyer (Chamber, Fifth Section, 11 July 2013). With an extensively elaborated reasoning, the Grand Chamber unanimously came to the conclusion that the applicant lawyer’s conviction for the defamation of two investigative judges violated Article 10 of the Convention. It found that the lawyer, Morice, had expressed value judgments in the newspaper Le Monde with a sufficient factual basis and that his remarks concerning a matter of public interest had not exceeded the limits of the...

The Court of Cassation has delivered a judgment which deserves reporting, since it concerns the scope of the transfer to the producer of a documentary of the right to use a person’s image by someone who has been interviewed. In the present case, the director of a review had granted a film interview to the producer of a documentary entitled “La vérité est ailleurs ou la véritable histoire des protocoles des sages de Sion” (‘the truth is elsewhere, or the true story of the Protocoles des Sages de Sion’), co-produced by and broadcast on the channel Arte. The purpose of the interview was to ascertain...

On 2 April 2015, the Paris Court of Appeal overturned a judgment delivered last year which found that the director of the France Televisions publication and the presenter of the programme ‘On n’est pas couché’ had insulted the leader of the Front National party by presenting a number of satirical drawings of her on television (see IRIS 2014-6/19). The image at issue represented the “family tree of Marine le Pen”, and included a photograph of her at the centre of a tree, the four main branches of which formed a swastika. The image was presented to coincide with the publication of a book on the genealogy...

On 19 March 2015, the regional court (tribunal de grande instance - TGI) of Paris delivered a judgment, which is a promising development for holders of rights involving sports events in their battle against on-line video platforms and streaming sites. The case involved the French professional football league (Ligue de Football Professionnel - LFP) which had granted exclusive live audiovisual rights for the League 1 and 2 championships (in return for 748.5 million euros per season for the period from 2016 to 2020) to the pay channels Canal Plus and beIN Sport, and for subsequent availability on...

On 11 March 2015, Minister for Culture and Communication Fleur Pellerin presented the Government’s strategy for combating piracy on the Internet to the Council of Ministers. Apart from the graduated response applied to illegal downloading implemented by France’s high authority for the distribution of works and the protection of rights on the Internet (Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet - HADOPI), which remains in place, the action plan is also aimed at streaming sites and referencing, which benefit from pirated works. Three series of measures were...