French Court Orders P2P News Site To Report On File Sharing Convictions

from the freedom-of-the-press? dept

Tue, Jun 16th 2009 10:42am — Mike Masnick

Here's an odd one. Apparently a French news site that focuses on file sharing/BitTorrent/P2P news has been ordered by a court to report on the convictions of file sharers in France. It's not entirely clear under what laws, but perhaps it's a "fairness doctrine" type of thing. Apparently, the big entertainment companies took the site to court over its failure to report on the convictions. The site is more well known for pushing back against things like three strikes laws or the typical propaganda from the industry -- so the industry pushed it to also publish news of the convictions. What's weird is that these "conviction reports" include lots of personal information on those who were convicted, including names, addresses, and birth dates. I'm somewhat surprised the site didn't try to put these convictions into a bit more "context" to show how silly or unreasonable they might be -- but perhaps the court order forbids that.

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Filed Under: convictions, file sharing, france, reporting

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Patrick, 16 Jun 2009 @ 11:22am

Apparently they're being compensated for publishing information on the convictions, so I guess it really is a fairness thing.
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Fabrice Epelboin (profile), 16 Jun 2009 @ 11:40am

not excatly
It's a very usual court order in France, the new thing here is that usualy, it's published in a normal (offline) newspaper.

Numerama is a technews website among the very few who battled against the Hadopi law (Numerama, Ecrans.fr, PCimpact and ReadWriteWeb France). It has a very big trafic, this is why the court decided to publish the conviction on Numerama.

On a sidenote, Guillaume Champeau from Numerama wrote a post about how he would disable crawlers on the conviction in order for the content not to be cached by google.
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mike42 (profile), 16 Jun 2009 @ 12:06pm

France...
Poster-child for the need for separation of Corp and State.
(US is the runner-up)
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Anonymous Coward, 16 Jun 2009 @ 12:21pm

Re: France...
I think it's the other way around but, heh, whatevs.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 16 Jun 2009 @ 12:43pm

Re: Re: France...
Arguable.

France's corporations are more entrenched and abusive, but American corporations are both larger and more prone to use their unofficial government backing to go pushing around other governments.
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stat_insig (profile), 16 Jun 2009 @ 1:37pm

Re: France...
I wonder where Iran fits in your list!
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Anonymous Coward, 16 Jun 2009 @ 3:00pm

how would it have those people name`s?
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