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In a judgment of 17 February 2010, the Court of Cassation ruled on the issue of the liability of video-sharing platforms for the first time. The case is well known: the director and producer of the film “Joyeux Noël” had taken legal action against Dailymotion, accusing the platform of allowing the film to be viewed using streaming technology despite having been sent formal notice to withdraw the film. The regional court in Paris had found in favour of the rightsholders on 13 July 2007 and held the company Dailymotion, categorised as a host service provider, guilty of infringement of copyright (see...

After four years of discussion, the SACEM and the on-line video site YouTube have announced the signature of an agreement, made public on 30 September 2010. This is the first agreement the site has reached with a French royalties society. The SACEM is a collective management society whose purpose is to represent and defend the interests of writers, writer-producers, comedians, composers and editors of music with a view to promoting musical creation. Its main task is to collect royalties and to redistribute them to the beneficiaries of the works that have been played or reproduced. Under this agreement,...

The companies La Chauve-Souris and 120 Films had a statement drawn up by sworn officers of the association to combat audiovisual piracy (Association de Lutte contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle - ALPA) noting that the video-sharing platform Dailymotion was showing shortened extracts of the film Sheitan, of which they are the producers. Dailymotion subsequently withdrew the unlawful content from its site. As extracts of the film were still being shown, the producers had the platform charged with piracy. Referring to its by now well-established jurisprudence, the third chamber of the regional court...

The Court of Milan has made public the decision in the criminal trial against four Google executives, charged of defamation and illegal personal data handling in relation to the publication on the video-sharing platform Google Video of a video containing an act of bullying against a person suffering from Down’s syndrome. The Court acquitted all the defendants on the charge of defamation, but found two managers and a former executive of Google Inc. liable for the illegal personal data handling. The case concerned a teenage boy with autism who was bullied by some classmates at a school in Turin in...

In two decisions handed down on 9 and 14 April 2010, the Paris Court of Appeal has confirmed the qualification of Google Vidéo and Dailymotion as hosts for sites storing audiovisual content in cases brought by the rightsholders of a film (“Le Monde selon Bush”) and of sketches (by the comedians Omar and Fred) who complained that their works had been put on line without their authorisation. These decisions have been awaited with interest, since they come after the Tiscali decision handed down by the Court of Cassation on 14 January 2010 (see IRIS 2010-2: 1/16), which attracted much comment. The...