Why Wikipedia Is Worried About Global 'Right To Be Forgotten' Delistings

from the book-of-laughter-and-forgetting dept

As Techdirt reported last year, the problematic "right to be forgotten" -- strictly speaking, a right to be delisted from search results -- took a really dangerous turn when the French data protection regulator told Google that its orders to delist results should apply globally, not just in France, a view it confirmed twice. The latest development in this saga is the submission of a petition to the French Supreme Court against the global reach of delisting, made by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia. As its blog post on the move explains:

Although the [French data protection authority] CNIL's case is directed towards Google, the gradual disappearance of Wikimedia pages from Google search results around the world ultimately impacts the public's ability to find the invaluable knowledge contained within the Wikimedia projects. Search engines have played an important role in the quest for knowledge -- roughly half of Wikipedia visits originate from search engines.

The CNIL's most recent order, if upheld, threatens the capacity to write and share important information about history, public figures, and more. It undermines the public's ability to find relevant and neutral information on the internet, and would make it exceedingly difficult for projects like Wikimedia's to provide information that is important for society.

The fact that half of Wikipedia's visits come from online searches emphasizes the point that delisting a page from search results effectively removes it from the Internet. The Wikimedia post goes on to make all the obvious -- and completely valid -- arguments why global delisting is such a bad idea. It also mentions the following:

As part of our efforts to bring more transparency to these requests, when we receive notice that a Wikipedia article was removed from a search engine due to a "right to be forgotten" delisting request, we publish the notice in a public index for the Wikimedia community's reference.

The page not only includes interesting statistics about delisting notices, but also helpfully provides copies of the notices themselves. From these we can see the Wikipedia articles that are no longer listed in search engines, which allows us to guess the names of those who don't want information about them to be readily available, and inevitably encourages us to speculate why that might be.

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Filed Under: censorship, eu, france, right to be forgotten, rtbf
Companies: google, wikimedia

Digital Republic Bill Uses Crowdsourcing To Promote Data Protection, Net Neutrality And Openness In France

from the what-will-happen-to-your-personal-data-when-you-die? dept

There have been plenty of really bad ideas coming out of France in the digital arena recently, as Techdirt has been reporting. So it makes a pleasant change to be able to write about a new law that has quite a few good ideas. One reason for that might be that the French government used a form of crowdsourcing to help shape what is known as the "Digital Republic Bill":

The bill's text was drafted following a ground-breaking co-construction process in the form of a massive nationwide consultation initiated by the Prime Minister in October 2014. In all, there were more than 4,000 contributions from businesses, government departments and individuals which were received, summarised and examined by the Conseil national du numérique (French Digital Council) which presented its findings and proposals to the government on 18 June 2015.

The first part of the bill is about data and knowledge dissemination, and aims to support openness in various forms. For example, it requires government departments to make information about their activities more easily accessible, and extends the scope of open government rules to include not just central and local government, but also public and private legal entities that operate under a public service mandate. The aim is to provide more government documents online as a matter of course, so that citizens don't need to make formal requests for them -- a sensible approach others should emulate. In addition, the French government will be:

expanding the open data policy to include public and private entities, public service concession holders or entities whose activities are subsidised by the public authorities.

The bill hopes to boost open access to research by creating a new "secondary exploitation right" for academics, under which:

the author may make his/her creation publicly available after an embargo period of 12 months from the first publication of scientific works, as long as this is not for commercial purposes. The timeframe will be 24 months for human and social science works as publishers in this sector do not have such a comfortable financial situation.

That's rather disappointing, since it enshrines long embargo periods even for non-commercial use. While the open access provisions are timid, an attempt to prevent the digital commons from being enclosed is much bolder. The French government proposes to set up:

a common information domain extending to the intellectual public domain, which has not yet been clearly defined, and which is not restricted to intellectual property as it includes elements such as information and ideas that are not protected by intellectual property rights, but still require protection against other exclusive rights.

It's not really clear what that will mean in practice, but it's good the French government is working on this issue. Also welcome, but more conventional, are moves to enshrine net neutrality in French law, and to require data transferability so that customers can easily retrieve and transfer their data between competing online services. Another novelty concerns online reviews. The Digital Republic Bill:

obliges websites publishing online reviews to expressly state whether said reviews have been verified. It stipulates that if websites do verify reviews, they have to clearly specify the main procedures. This new obligation will allow consumers to decide for themselves how much trust they can place in the reviews available and, thus, in the website which publishes them.

A large portion of the new bill seeks to enhance the protection of personal data. It enshrines a general right of individuals to decide how their personal data is communicated and used, and strengthens the powers of France's data protection agency, the CNIL. As a post on the Data Protection Report explains:

the bill would increase the amount of monetary sanctions that the CNIL can impose for privacy violations, which reflects the relevant sanction provisions of the future GDPR [the EU's new data protection law]. The CNIL would thus be able to impose monetary sanctions on a data controller of up to 20 million euros or 4% of its worldwide turnover. The sanction would be limited to 10 million euros or 2% of the worldwide turnover for minor violations of the DPA.

In addition, the bill would authorize certain types of organizations to bring data protection class actions on behalf of consumers in the event of a data breach. This would apply to:

(a) associations protecting privacy and personal data; (b) consumer protection associations; (b) trade unions, when the processing affects employees; and (c) any association created for the sole purpose of filing the class action.

Finally -- in all senses -- one forward-thinking element of the new Digital Republic Bill is that it will give people the right to make arrangements for the storage and communication of their personal data after death:

People will be able to send instructions concerning the treatment of their personal data to the CNIL or to a data controller, and may appoint a person responsible for carrying out these instructions.

Moreover, ISPs will have to inform the user about what will happen to this data after his/her death and let him/her choose whether or not to transfer it to the third party of his/her choice.

As the population of Internet users ages, this is likely to become a major issue. It's good to see France tackling it head-on with the Digital Republic Bill -- one of the few countries to do so. The proposed law now passes to the French Senate, but is unlikely to undergo any major modifications there, not least because it has already been subject to unusually wide consultation thanks to the innovative approach used in drawing it up.

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Filed Under: data protection, digital republic bill, france, net neutrality, open access, open knowledge, privacy

Former Intelligence Official Leaks Details Of NSA's Hack Of French Presidential Network

from the looselips.avi dept

The latest leak about the NSA's overseas spying transgressions took the unlikely form of a little-noticed YouTube video -- one that covered mostly-wonkish subject matter. The details of the NSA's malware attack on the French "White House" were revealed during an interview with Bernard Barbier, the former head of the French Intelligence Service, by a local engineering school. The video, of course, has since been removed, but not before French paper Le Monde picked up on the content of the interview.

Matt Suiche parses it all out -- an inadvertent confirmation of a Snowden document leaked in 2013 that contained an itinerary item about a discussion between French and US intelligence officials concerning a (at that time "alleged") "May 2012 cyber attack on the French Presidential network."

Sure, spies are known for spying on foreign governments. But allied countries were supposed to keep this sort of non-brotherly spying to a minimum. The former head of the French Intelligence Agency described the meeting this way:

“I received the order from the successor of Mr Sarkozy (Francois Hollande) to go in the U.S. to shout at them. We were sure it was them. At the end of the meeting, Keith Alexander (Director of the NSA) was not happy. When we were in the bus, he told me he was disappointed because he never thought we would detect them and he even added “You guys are good”. The major Allied Powers, we do not spy on them. The fact the U.S. broke this rule was a shock” 

Note that Keith Alexander wasn't sorry the NSA had breached international spy agency decorum, much less attacked the presidential network of a foreign ally. He was only sorry his agency had been caught -- and by a comparatively-unpowered agency at that.

Barbier notes elsewhere in his interview that the agency that sniffed out the NSA intrusion did it with 1/20th of the workforce and 1/40th of the budget. The NSA, in his view, is an argument against government bloat. More dollars do not equate to better spying. Indiscriminate targeting and even more indiscriminate collecting lead to a lot of analyst busywork.

Despite this disagreement over NSA hacking, it appears Keith Alexander found some common ground with the head of French Intelligence. One of the things the NSA does with the data it collects is kill. France is apparently using its collections the same way.

Another surreal part is when Keith Alexander told Bernard Barbier about the “Find & Fire” projects they have in Iraq to identify (within a 7km radius) & eliminate bad guys with drones. So apparently France is working on similar technologies as Barbier managed to convinced them to do the same…

So, there's that. Even if spy agencies can't agree on the propriety of snooping on world neighbors, at least they both believe metadata is an indispensable part of their respective extrajudicial killing programs.

And, given the nature of this leak, both agencies will probably be taking a closer look at the non-disclosure agreements foisted upon departing employees.

Filed Under: bernard barbier, france, nsa, surveillance

France Passes Copyright Law Demanding Royalties For Every Image Search Engines Index Online

from the that'll-work-out-just-fine dept

The Disruptive Competition Project is detailing yet another bad copyright law change in Europe -- France, in particular, this time. Called the Freedom of Creation Act, it actually passed a few months ago, but people are just beginning to understand and comprehend the full horror of what's happening. Basically, it will now require any site that indexes images on the internet (i.e., any image search engine) to pay royalties for each image to a collection society.

How would this work? When an image is published online, the reproduction right and the right of communication to the public of this image shall be transferred to one or more collecting societies appointed by the French government. Online communication services “reproducing and communicating to the public images for search and indexing purposes” shall have to obtain a license from those collecting societies to index images legally. The license fee will either be based on the revenue accruing from the exploitation of the service or be a lump sum fee.

Of course, this makes no sense. In the US, thankfully, multiple cases on things like Google Images have found that indexing the images and showing thumbnails is clearly fair use. But that's not how it's going to work in France.

This seems particularly pointless on any number of levels. First, image search engines aren't "publishing" any works, they're just indexing what's already online and showing people where those images are. Second, if people creating works don't want them indexed they can just use robots.txt. And, yes, someone else might post those images elsewhere, but that's no reason to blame and charge a search engine. But the bigger issue, honestly, is that it's hard to see how this sort of system actually helps content creators at all. Does anyone honestly believe that the money this collection society collects will go to the people who created the indexed images? Remember, copyright collection societies have a very long and very detailed history of abuse and corruption. They collect lots of money, but they're not so great about paying it back out. And, as the Disruptive Competition Project points out, this is particularly problematic in this case, where both jurisdictional questions and just basic logistics make it almost impossible for the collection society to accurately distribute funds:

Moreover, the territorial scope of this measure is unclear. Are the rights of reproduction and communication to the public transferred to a collecting society when an image is published on a French website or on any website? Is the measure based on the nationality of the works? In practice, this measure may claim ownership of the billions of pictures uploaded everyday globally – even though the huge majority of those pictures are published today for personal use by the close-to-3-billion smartphones’ owners, not expecting any revenue. It is also worth noting that a sizable number of those pictures is published under a Creative Commons license that usually refuse remuneration in return, for example, for attribution. Therefore, this measure would override the choice made by users publishing under such a license – and more generally, would deprive rightsholders of the choice between licensing their pictures or not.

Even worse, there is no realistic way for collecting societies to redistribute the revenues from the license fees accurately and fairly to billions of rightsholders all over the world. The relevant collecting societies won’t attempt to contact all French rightsholders (when close to 70% of French citizens above 15 years old have a smartphone!), let alone all global rightsholders. In practice, the money will be split between the relevant collecting societies and the few rightsholders affiliated to those societies, who – as we say in France – won the “Jackpot”.

It will be worth following to see how this plays out. If France does follow through and a collection society actually goes after Google, it does make me wonder if Google might pull out the nuclear option yet again and shut down Google Images in France as it did with Google News in Spain, when the Spanish government passed a similar tax on news aggregation.

Once again, like so many of these laws, this seems to not be so much about copyright as it is about taxing Google.

Filed Under: copyright, france, image search, images
Companies: google

Nice Officials Say They'll Sue Internet Users Who Share Photos Of French Fashion Police Fining Women In Burkinis

from the liberte! dept

Over the last few weeks there's been plenty of controversy over plans on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France to ban burkinis -- a kind of full body bathing suit favored by some Muslim women. As the Guardian pointed out recently, the whole thing seems like a "bizarre inversion" of Muslim countries where making sure women are covered is enforced:

The burkini row may seem banal, and to some a surreal inversion of laws in Islamic countries, but it has become yet another flame in the murderous tinderbox of Islamism in France, invoking issues of control over the body, religious freedom, racism, provocation, terrorism, Islam and Islamophobia, republicanism and what the French call laïcité. Lïïcité is the hardest for people outside France to understand: our words “laity” and “secularism” fail to express the depth of allergy to all things theocratic, which is endemic to French societal fabric since the revolution.

Others are pointing out the absurdities when compared to what's allowed. I've seen several versions of this, but this one is my favorite: Either way, the story blew up again last night as the Daily Mail reported on actual instances of women on a beach in Nice being forced to remove clothing and pay fines. While the Daily Mail is not particularly trustworthy on news, a number of other publications have now confirmed the story as well, and pictures are floating around on social media of police forcing women to remove clothing, including one where it's pretty clearly not a burkini at all, but just a large shirt or muumuu of some sort. This seems pretty ridiculous on all sorts of levels, but never think things are so ridiculous that some politicians can't make them worse. Guillaume Champeau from the excellent French site Numerama alerts me to the news that the deputy mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi is threatening to sue those who share these images over social media. Yup, France, a country that claims to pride itself on freedom is not just telling women that they can't cover themselves up too much on the beach, but that it's also illegal to report on the police following through on that. Here's is the awkward Google translation of the French report:

Christian Estrosi ... has published a press release by the city of Nice, to announce that he would file a complaint against those who would broadcast pictures of municipal police verbalize women guilty of exercising what they believed to be their freedom to dress from head to feet on the beaches.

" Photos showing municipal police of Nice in the exercise of their functions have been circulating this morning on social networks and raise defamation and threats against these agents ," the statement said.

Wait. Showing accurate photos creates defamation against the police? How's that work? Estrosi apparently says that legal actions have already been filed, though Numerama was unable to confirm any legal actions as yet. The article also notes that despite Estrosi implying otherwise, police do not have any sort of special protections that say they cannot be photographed while in public.

Either way, it's not clear what this kind of move will accomplish other than making France appear intolerant and petty towards all sorts of freedoms, including religious freedoms and freedom of speech.

Filed Under: burkinis, christian estrosi, cote d'azur, france, free speech, nice, social media

French Government Wants A 'Global Initiative' To Undermine Encryption And Put Everyone At Risk

from the this-is-a-bad,-bad-idea dept

Some bad ideas never seem to die. It appears that the French government is working to enlist other countries to try to undermine encryption and put us all at much greater risk. That's about the only way to read the news that French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve is promoting a "global initiative" to "fight" messaging encryption used by ISIS.

Messaging encryption, widely used by Islamist extremists to plan attacks, needs to be fought at international level, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday, and he wants Germany to help him promote a global initiative.

He meets his German counterpart, Thomas de Maiziere, on Aug. 23 in Paris and they will discuss a European initiative with a view to launching an international action plan, Cazeneuve said.

Remember, of course, that much of the planning and communications for the Paris attacks last year were done without encryption, and in fact much of the planning was done fairly out in the open with little effort to mask what was happening. Of course, that won't always be true -- and certainly it's quite likely that people are plotting all sorts of nasty stuff with encryption -- but even then that doesn't actually result in law enforcement "going dark" as they'd have you believe. First of all, encryption is still difficult to use and easy to mess up. In fact, most reports suggest that ISIS is pretty bad about its opsec when it comes to encryption. And, even if they are successfully using encryption, they still leave plenty of other breadcrumbs for law enforcement and the intelligence community to track.

On top of that, any effort to weaken encryption is both dangerous and pointless. A mandate for backdoors or something similar only introduces vulnerabilities into encryption that will be targeted by criminals (and possibly terrorists!) putting many, many, many more people at risk. And it's pointless because there are enough open source encryption products at this point that trying to regulate other products won't help much. ISIS will just focus on using code they already have access to.

So none of this adds up, other than as a stupid reactionary move out of fear and ignorance. A "global initiative" to fight encryption ignores the fact that encryption isn't some invisibility cloak that masks all terrorist activity. It also makes us all less safe, and probably won't stop ISIS from actually using strong encryption. So what is the point other than shadowboxing and making it look like politicians are doing something, when they're not sure what to do about possible attacks?

Filed Under: bernard cazeneuve, encryption, france, global initiative, going dark, isis

Paris Court Says Search Engines Don't Need To Block Torrent Searches

from the good-ruling dept

Copyright rulings in France have occasionally been a complete disaster in the past, so it's nice to see the High Court of Paris recognize that Google and Microsoft cannot be forced to block any searches that include the word "torrent." The two separate lawsuits were brought by SNEP, which could be seen as the French version of the RIAA. The organization argued that since the law allowed "all appropriate measures" to be used to block infringement, it could demand that search engines block any searches that include the word torrent. The court wasn't buying it, noting correctly that not all torrents are infringing, and such a rule would be way too broad:

“SNEP’s requests are general, and pertain not to a specific site but to all websites accessible through the stated methods, without consideration for identifying or even determining the site’s content, on the premise that the term ‘Torrent’ is necessarily associated with infringing content,” the Court writes in its order.

More specifically, the court notes that the word “torrent” has many legitimate uses, as does the BitTorrent protocol, which is a neutral communication technology. This means that blocking everything “torrent” related is likely to censor legal content as well.

“Yet [torrent] is primarily a common noun, with a meaning in French and in English; it also refers to a neutral communication protocol developed by the company Bittorrent that enables access to lawfully downloaded files.

“The requested measures are thus tantamount to general monitoring and may block access to lawful websites,” the High Court order adds.

That was in the ruling in the case against Microsoft. In the case against Google, SNEP lost on more of a procedural technicality. Google pointed out that SNEP brought the case in the name of just three artists, rather than itself, and the court more or less agreed that SNEP couldn't bring a case on behalf of just those artists. Still, the clear ruling on the Microsoft case suggests that SNEP wouldn't have had any more luck against Google if it had filed the case in the correct procedural way.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, france, paris, search, search results, torrent
Companies: google, microsoft, snep

France Might Allow NGOs To Sell Public Domain Seeds To Non-Commercial Buyers. Might?

from the so-what's-the-problem? dept

When Techdirt has written about seeds in the past, it tended to be in the context of patents, and how Big Agribusiness is trying to use multiple layers of intellectual monopolies to prevent patented seeds from entering the public domain. By contrast, seeds that are already in the public domain -- that is, owned by no one and thus everyone -- ought to be unproblematic. But an interesting story in Intellectual Property Watch indicates that's not the case in France:

the French Senate is due to consider a bill on biodiversity for the third time. That bill, which could be modifying several legislations, might allow for the sharing and selling by non-governmental organisations of seeds in the public domain to non-commercial buyers, which is so far not permitted under the current French legislation, according to sources.

The fact that non-governmental organisations are currently not allowed to sell public domain seeds to non-commercial buyers seems curious, to say the least. The issue seems to be about governmental control, since the new law:

would allow NGOs already sharing and selling seeds to individual gardeners, which are not on the French National official seeds catalogue, to legalise their activities, and escape prosecution, according to a press release [pdf] (in French) from Kokopelli, one of those associations.

That's a reminder of how controlling seeds was a key government power back in the days when agriculture represented a far greater share of economic activity than it does now. Such control may have been justified back then in terms of ensuring that "official" seeds were the varieties they claimed to be, and of high quality. But it's surely time for restrictions on selling public domain seeds to be relaxed not just in France but everywhere they exist, to promote biodiversity and to offer a counterbalance to the increased control exercised by companies using patents.

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Filed Under: france, patents, public domain, seeds

Google To France: No You Don't Get To Censor The Global Internet

from the well-this-could-get-interesting dept

As we've been covering here at Techdirt, French regulators have been pushing Google to censor the global internet whenever it receives "right to be forgotten" requests. If you don't recall, two years ago, there was a dangerous ruling in the EU that effectively said that people could demand Google remove certain links from showing up when people searched on their names. This "right to be forgotten" is now being abused by a ton of people trying to hide true information they just don't like being known. Google grudgingly has agreed to this, having little choice to do otherwise. But it initially did so only on Google's EU domain searches. Last year, a French regulator said that it needed to apply globally. Google said no, explaining why this was a "troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web."

French regulators responded with "don't care, do it!" Google tried to appease the French regulators earlier this year with a small change where even if you went to Google.com, say, from France (rather than the default of Google.fr), Google would still censor the links based on your IP address. And, again, the French regulators said not good enough, and told Google it needed to censor globally. It also issued a fine.

As we noted at the time, Google immediately said it planned to appeal and that's now officially in motion, as was explained in a writeup on Google's own blog (and was also published in France's Le Monde newspaper).

As a matter of both law and principle, we disagree with this demand. We comply with the laws of the countries in which we operate. But if French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries - perhaps less open and democratic - start demanding that their laws regulating information likewise have global reach? This order could lead to a global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one’s own country. For example, this could prevent French citizens from seeing content that is perfectly legal in France. This is not just a hypothetical concern. We have received demands from governments to remove content globally on various grounds -- and we have resisted, even if that has sometimes led to the blocking of our services.

This is a big, big deal for how the global internet will function. Giving the most censorious and autocratic countries veto powers over the global internet should obviously raise serious concerns among everyone -- even those among you who hate or fear Google.

Filed Under: borders, censorship, france, free speech, internet, jurisdiction, right to be forgotten
Companies: google

Photojournalist Being Sued For Publishing Image Of Aftermath Of Paris Attacks

from the a-thousand-words dept

Typically, when we've talked about photojournalists in the past, it's been about how they will occasionally make demands for payment for the pictures or videos they've taken with little to no regard for the way fair use works. For the times we've instead focused on stories involving any kind of trouble for photojournalists, the stories are usually about how law enforcement harrasses anyone who tries to document it doing its job. That makes the story of Maya Vidon-White, a photographer in Paris, a new one for me. Maya is currently the subject of criminal charges in France. Her crime? Documenting the aftermath of the now-infamous Paris terror attacks.

Vidon-White was in Paris at the time of the attacks and managed to snap photographs of the immediate aftermath just outside of the Bataclan concert hall, where gunmen murdered 89 people and wounded hundreds more. One photograph she took and later sold to a news outlet for publication showed an injured man, Cedric Gomet, on the ground receiving medical attention. Under an obscure French law, this is apparently a crime.

About two months after she took the photo, Vidon-White was told that she was being prosecuted under the so-called Guigou law, which prohibits the publication of photos showing the victims of terrorist attacks in a way that violates their "human dignity." The lawyer for Gomet's family, Jean Sannier, says the photographer and VSD violated the law by publishing the Bataclan photo on a double-page spread, and by not blurring out Cedric's face. The family has filed charges against both Vidon-White and VSD, and are seeking damages totaling €34 000, in addition to legal fees; the photographer could face a fine of up to €15,000.

"The fact that VSD thought it was right to publish this photo on November 17th, saying that Cedric was still alive, was extremely painful for the family and those close to him," Sannier said in a phone interview. "Even if the family knew he was at the Bataclan the night of the 13th, his friends were not necessarily aware, and they were all happy to learn [from the photo] that he was alive."

Part of the issue here is that French weekly magazine VSD mistakenly stated in its story, of which the picture was a part, that Gomet was still alive. In actuality, he had died after the photo was taken from his wounds. There is nothing to suggest that this mistake was anything other than an error, yet the family and its lawyer keep bringing up the point. It's hard to imagine that an honest mistake would suddenly open up a news organization to criminal charges and civil damages, nevermind that Vidon-White had nothing to do with the facts relayed within VSD.

As for this application of Guigou law itself, the attempt is every bit as ridiculous as the law itself. The legislation invoked here appears to be named after Elisabeth Guigou, one-time Minister of Social Affairs and Minister of Justice in France. In 2000, she had sponsored the law which was aimed at keeping news publications from publishing photographs of those accused of crimes if they were wearing handcuffs or in scenes where it might somehow indicate a presumption of guilt. That in itself is a silly bit of control exerted by government over what might otherwise be a free press...but it's difficult to see how its aims would apply to the photograph taken by Vidon-White.

Vidon-White's lawyer appears equally confused.

The lawyer representing Vidon-White, Vincent Tolédano, says the case should be thrown out because the law only applies to victims who are still alive, and therefore does not cover the families of the deceased. The Guigou law was passed in 2000, after survivors of a 1995 metro bombing filed a lawsuit against a magazine that had published images of them. In an email, Tolédano pointed to a document circulated by the Judicial Ministry, which says that images violating the law must contain a "degrading" element, and that an image of a victim, in itself, isn't "sufficient."

"The image produced by Maya Vidon-White... does not contain the 'degrading' dimension required by law," Tolédano said in an email. "We must therefore not confuse, in the horror of an event, the pain of the victims, who command the utmost respect, and the work of journalists."

After all, there's no implication that the victim of the terrorist attack shown is guilty of anything at all. He's a victim. On top of the questionable application of the law, someone is going to have to explain to me exactly how we're supposed to operate in an age where the picture, or video, is everything in news stories, but we're going to attempt to legislate limits of those depictions that can be shown to the public. If a photojournalist isn't allowed to faithfully portray the aftermath of one of the most newsworthy and important events in recent French history, one with global implications, then don't pretend to have a press anymore. There's no point.

The case currently sits before a French judge who will decide whether the case can proceed. It should be tossed immediately.

Filed Under: bataclan, cedric gomet, crimnal, france, guigou law, maya vidon-white, paris attacks, photojournalism
Companies: vsd