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On 18 November 2011, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced during a forum on culture in the digital era his desire to extend the fight to combat illegal downloading to the streaming of musical and audiovisual works. “If technology allows us further evolution, then the law will be adapted,” he said. It should be recalled that the Decree of 5 March 2010 authorising the HADOPI to process the data transmitted to it by rightsholders and access providers currently only refers to peer-to-peer activity. As a result, and despite the fact that it is increasingly frequent, the HADOPI does not currently...

After two years of work, the nationwide switch to DTV in France was completed on 29 November 2011. The result is a complete end to analog terrestrial broadcasting - “not an end, but a beginning”, according to one member of the CSA, referring to the “irresistible advent of connected television, which will make television and the Internet coexist on the same screen”. The combination of audiovisual content, which is heavily regulated, and content from the Internet, which is not regulated, indeed raises new questions concerning regulation. How will it be possible, for example, to protect young people...

On 20 December 2011, the French parliament adopted a new act on private copying levies. This followed a ruling of the Conseil d’Etat (Council of State) of 17 June 2011 which, particularly in view of the ECJ’s Padawan judgement (see IRIS 2010-10/7), revoked a decision of the Commission « copie privée » (Private Copying Committee), which is responsible for determining the types of equipment and the rates and methods of remuneration for private copying due to rightsholders under Articles 311-1 et seq. of the Intellectual Property Code. The decision had been revoked on the grounds that all equipment...

On 4 November 2011 the first civil chamber of the Court of Cassation delivered an interesting decision on the perimeters of the authorisation given by professionals filmed for the purposes of a documentary. In the case at issue, a number of members of the crime prevention police unit in Nice had agreed to their image being used in a reportbroadcast in which they appear carrying out their duties. Although they had agreed to being filmed and their image was broadcast without being blurred, they nevertheless felt that their privacy had been invaded and deplored the fact that their names and rank had...

The intensity of the sound of commercials has been a recurrent source of complaints from viewers to the audiovisual regulatory body (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel - CSA) for more than ten years (an average of three complaints each week), and the legislator and the regulatory authority have now taken the matter in hand. Article 177 of Act No. 2010-788 of 12 July 2010, Article 14 of Decree No. 92-280 of 27 March 1992 (as amended), and Article 27 of the Act of 30 September 1986 (as amended) require channels to observe an even volume of sound for both television programmes and commercial breaks,...