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On 21 February 2019, at the request of the National Assembly’s Committee on Cultural Affairs and Education, the French competition authority published its opinion on the forthcoming audiovisual reforms. The authority’s key proposal is for the relaxation of restrictions on traditional audiovisual providers in order to enable them to compete on equal terms with online video platforms (e.g. Amazon and Netflix). The evidence is clear: these new platforms, which entered the market in 2014 and have more subscribers in France than Canal Plus (Netflix has over 5 million subscribers) have adopted an innovative...

On 31 January 2019, a Catholic priest suspected of abusing boy scouts lodged an application for emergency proceedings to be initiated against the film production company responsible for the film “Grâce à Dieu” (“By the Grace of God”), which was due to be released on 20 February 2019. Copies had already been delivered to 307 cinemas and a huge publicity campaign costing EUR 1 million had already been launched. Directed by François Ozon, the film depicts the battle fought by victims of child abuse allegedly carried out by the priest, whose real name is used in the film. Claiming a violation of his...

Following the first screening in cinema theatres on 6 February 2019 of the film “Une Intime Conviction”, which recounts the appeal lodged by a law professor suspected of having killed his wife and the work of his defence lawyers to obtain his acquittal - in March 2010 - , the wife’s lover had the production company summoned under the urgent procedure in an effort to have showing of the film stopped on the grounds of invasion of his privacy. In its decision of 22 February, the court began by stating that, since the application sought to prevent the showing of an intellectual work, the applicant...

On 6 February 2019, the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartels Office - BKartA) issued a prohibition notice against Facebook Inc. (USA), Facebook Ireland Ltd. and Facebook Germany GmbH, primarily concerning their plans to combine user data from Facebook-owned services. On competition law grounds, Facebook was prohibited in particular from allowing private users resident in Germany to use its social network only if it could assign data collected from its other services - WhatsApp, Oculus, Masquerade and Instagram -  and from third-party websites that contain Facebook interfaces to their Facebook account...

In a decision of 21 February 2019, the I. Zivilsenat (first civil chamber) of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court - BGH), which is responsible for copyright-related cases, submitted to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) a number of questions concerning the scope of information that the YouTube video platform must disclose in relation to users who infringe copyright. In the case at hand, a film distributor had launched an action against YouTube LLC and its parent company, Google Inc., claiming an infringement of its exclusive rights to exploit the films “Parker” and “Scary...