Friday 5 December 2014

News from France

                                                             

On December 2nd, the Paris Court of Appeals handed down its ruling in the long running litigation between the French commercial TV broadcaster TF1 and DailyMotion, the "French YouTube".

The Court, while rejecting TF1's argument that DailyMotion was the publisher of the content posted to its site by users (and holding, to the contrary, that it was, in respect of such content, entitled to the safe harbour protection as hosting entity), did find that DailyMotion failed in its duty to act promptly upon proper notification to remove the infringing conetent.  TF1 (and its various subsidiaries) was therefore awarded €1.3M in damages.

On December 4th, the Paris High Court released its decision in a site blocking case brought by SCPP (the recorded music industry's representative body) in relation to the notorious Pirate Bay sites.  In accordance with Section L.336-2 of the Intellectual Property Code, the action was brought against the ISPs (and not the site operators themselves).  The Court allowed the action and ordered the ISPs to block access to the infringing sites.

The FrenchKat intends to post a more detailed analysis of both of these decisions just as soon as he can!


No comments: