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On 12 March 2014, the audiovisual regulatory authority (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel - CSA) issued a “firm” warning to the France Télévisions group further to comments made by sports commentators during the Olympic Games in Sochi. The group attracted the wrath of viewers because of a number of comments proffered by a former champion and a journalist who were both reporting on the figure skating events. A number of the utterances at issue referred to the physical appearance of the female skaters, such as “The costume’s quite an eyeful - and so is she”, “Valentina has loads of charm, rather...

On 27 February 2014, the court of appeal of Paris ordered Arte to stop broadcasting the bi-media programme Intime Conviction, thereby upholding the decision of the judge deliberating under the urgent procedure the day before. The programme began with a television film, broadcast on 14 February 2014, telling the story of a fictional character, a medical examiner named Paul Villers, who was suspected of having murdered his wife. The Franco-German channel achieved its second-highest audience rating of the year that evening. The second stage of the programme was the scheduled showing, between 10 February...

On 26 November 2013, the Court of Cassation put an end to the proceedings between the production company Endemol, the “inventor” of the audiovisual format of locked-in reality TV, and the company run by its former employee, ALJ Production, which launched the Dilemme programme. Endemol claimed that the programme, broadcast from May to July 2010 on the channel W9, adopted the essential features, both technical and aesthetic, of its own audiovisual formats and programmes, thereby creating confusion in the public’s mind. The company instigated proceedings against its competitor on the grounds of unfair...

On 16 January 2014, the court of appeal of Douai overturned the judgment handed down in January 2012 by the regional court of Lille in the high-profile case of the documentary entitled Le Mur (not to be confused with Dieudonné’s banned show!), which criticises the treatment of autism by psychoanalysis (see IRIS 2012-3/20). Three psychoanalysts had agreed, under the terms of an authorisation to use their images and their voices, to be filmed and interviewed for the three-part documentary. When the film was released, they had called on the courts to completely ban its showing, on the grounds that...

In a judgment delivered on 12 February 2014, the judge sitting in urgent matters at the regional court in Paris ordered the removal of two passages from the video entitled 2014 sera l’année de la quenelle by humourist/polemist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, shown on YouTube and judged as constituting a crime against humanity and incitement to racial hatred. The video has been duplicated by other users, including other video platforms, and has been viewed more than 3 million times. YouTube refused to remove the video unless the disputed content was declared illegal by the courts, and until the judgment...