(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
Court dismisses A.G.’s action aimed at taking down allegedly anti-Semitic blog “Joe Le Corbeau” based on lack of respect of formalities of 1881 law on freedom of press (lack of characterization and qualification of the incriminated speech).
blogger Bluetoof is held liable on the ground of fraudulent accessing and/or remaining on an automated data processing system further to the publication of confidential document of ANSES (national agency for food, environmental and occupational health and safety) that he had found on the Internet. the Court reversed the decision from the trial court which had considered that there could not be a fraudulent access if the data processing system was unprotected and freely available on Google.