This case refers to the geographical scope of delistings in "right to be forgotten" (droit au déréférencement) requests. Google filed a complaint on the Conseil d'Etat against the decision of CNIL to fine the company in the amount of 100,000 Euros for failing to comply with the commission letter of formal notice. On the letter, CNIL demanded Google to delist search results on all the extensions of domain name of its search engine (google.fr; google.uk; etc...). CNIL considered the measures took by the company insufficient to ensure the data protection rights of European citizens. In this decision, the Conseil d'Etat stayed the proceedings and referred three questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The first question is if a search engine, when implementing the ECJ's Google Spain decision, must delist the...
With this decision, the Conseil d'Etat refers to the ECJ questions about the implementation of the "right to be forgotten", based on four requests refused by Google, brought to CNIL and refused by the Commission, and then brought by the claimants to the Conseil. The Conseil d'Etat seeks clarification on the interpretation of the Google Spain about the obligations of a search engine to delist search results pointing to web pages that contain sensistive data - as defined in the EU Directive 95/46/EU (the Data Protection Directive)
According to the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), by the date of this deliberation Google has processed approximately 80,000 requests of French citizens to delist specific results from its search engine (right to be forgotten requests). The decision affirms the company delisted 51,5% of the requests. To address the complaints of French citizens who had their requests refused, CNIL launched an investigation on the company. Following the assessment of the complaints, CNIL requested Google to delist several results. According to the authority, "it was expressly requested that the delisting should be effective on whole search engine, irrespective of the extension used (.fr; .uk; .com ...). As the delistings were carried out in European extensions, and not in extensions such as google.com or other non-European...
(prepared by Swiss Institute of Comparative Law for Council of Europe)
This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. [The report for France is also available in French on the site.] The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.
The High Court of Paris ordered ISPs to “implement all necessary measures to prevent access from the French territory to the music file-sharing site the Pirate Bay and its redirection sites and mirror sites.” The French Court acted upon a claim of the Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques Civil Society of Phonogram Producers (SCPP). he blocking order was issued on the basis of Article L336-2 of the French Code of Intellectual Property. The article implements Article 8(3) of the EU Information Society Directive by providing that “in the presence of an infringement of a copyright or related right caused by the content of a public online communication service, the high court . . . may order at the request of rights holders . . . all appropriate measures to prevent or stop such infringement of a copyright or...
The Paris Court of Appeals handed down a decision awarding €1.3M in damages to the French commercial TV broadcaster TF1 against DailyMotion, which failed its duty of promptly removing infringing materials from its platform. However, the Court stated that DailyMotion enjoys limitation of liability as a hosting provider and is not required to proactively monitor users' infringing activities. See also CIS blog post