Search results : 1132

An interesting judgment delivered on 17 October 2014 by the press chamber of the Regional Court in Paris is the outcome of a case involving proof of the good faith of a television journalist being prosecuted for defamation. In the case at issue, an Algerian man had a summons issued against the directors of the publication of a television channel and its Internet site, and the journalist who wrote a paper, which was broadcast on the main evening news on television on the expulsion of five Islamists ordered by the Minister for the Interior. The photograph of the plaintiff had been shown on the screen,...

In a decision on 16 October, the Court of Appeal in Paris overturned the judgment of the Regional Court in Paris which had ordered Facebook France to reinstate a “non-official” page operated by fans of the popular TV series Plus Belle la Vie (“PBLV”), which had been blocked the previous year by its executive producer (see IRIS 2014-1/21). In the present case, the creator and moderator of “pblvmarseille”, a non-official Internet site devoted to the series launched the “PBLV Marseille” Facebook page in 2008. In 2012, she discovered that the producer of the series and owner of the “Plus Belle la Vie”...

In a judgment delivered on 9 October 2014, the Regional Court of Paris banned and heavily penalised the online broadcasting on the Playtv.fr site of television programmes belonging to the France Télévisions group (France TV). Since 2010, the company Playmédia has been offering a service free of charge and without subscription showing television channels, which are accessible on the Internet. In the face of the public-sector group’s refusal to allow its programmes to be carried, PlayTV claimed that it ought to have the benefit of the must-carry scheme. Article 34-2 of the Act of 30 September 1986...

Netflix, the American subscription video on demand (SVOD) giant, was launched in France on 15 September 2014. A few days earlier, the operator Bouygues Telecom announced that it had signed an agreement with the world leader in SVOD, giving not only its Bbox Sensation clients, but also the future clients of its Android box, direct access via their television set to the unlimited SVOD Netflix service. Without Bouygues, Netflix would not have been available via Internet boxes, which is the preferred mode of access in France to top-of-the-range telecom services.  At the same time, Paris Tech carried...

On 17 September 2014, the high authority for the broadcasting 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) published an interesting opinion, further to a referral by two individuals on the exception for making a private copy of television programmes received via an Internet access provider (IAP) or by satellite. One of HADOPI’s tasks is to ensure that the technical measures used to protect works do not hamper interoperability and the exercise of exceptions to copyright, such as making a private...