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On 17 April 2012, the French competition authority (Autorité de la Concurrence) announced the start of a thorough investigation into the acquisition by the Canal Plus Group of the DTV channels Direct 8 and Direct Star. On 5 December 2011 France’s main pay-TV operator notified its acquisition, which gave it a toe-hold in the free-access TV market. In investigating the situation, the competition authority held that the operation raised “serious fears” that competition was being impeded. The Canal Plus Group occupies an extremely strong position, particularly in the upstream markets for acquiring...

France has been through a national tragedy, with the murder of three children and their teacher outside a Jewish school in Toulouse on the morning of 19 March 2012, coming just days after attacks resulted in the death of three soldiers in nearby towns. The killer was quickly identified and located; he had barricaded himself inside his home, where he was killed by police on the morning of 22 March, after more than 32 hours of negotiation with no result. At the same time, the Paris headquarters of the news channel Al Jazeera received an anonymous letter, postmarked 21 March 2012, claiming responsibility...

On 13 April 2012 the regional court in Paris delivered a judgment under the urgent procedure in a case concerning the comedian Dieudonné. A video entitled Dieudonné l’antisémite - Les camps de concentration (Dieudonné the anti-Semite - the concentration camps), produced and directed by Dieudonné, which could be viewed on the YouTube site, promoted the film L’Antisémite that was to go on sale the following month on the Internet. The disputed sequence, used for the trailer and shown at the start of the film, shows the arrival of an American officer, played by the comedian, discovering a concentration...

On 21 March 2012 the European Commission gave the green light for the national scheme to digitise France’s film heritage (see IRIS 2011-7/23). The national centre for cinematography and animated images (Centre National de la Cinéma et de l’image animée - CNC) has been instructed to implement the action programme, which will have a EUR 400 million budget over six years. Short films and feature films produced up to 1999 will be eligible, along with historic silent films. The European Commission carried out an investigation to determine the compatibility of the digitisation scheme with Community rules...

On 12 March 2012 the judge sitting in urgent matters at the regional court in Paris had to deal with an application for suspension of the broadcasting of a programme entitled Vol AF 447 Rio/Paris : les raisons d’un crash (Flight 447 from Rio to Paris - the reasons for a crash), scheduled to be shown two evenings later on the public channel France 3, which included a reconstruction of the last four minutes immediately preceding the disaster. On the basis of Article 809 of the Code of Civil Procedure, the fathers of the two pilots and an association defending the victims of the accident were calling...