Carl Lang, the leader of right-wing French political party Front
National, brought an action in November for an article that
appeared on the web site of Réseau Voltaire in June 1999. Lang
claimed the article was defamatory. Réseau Voltaire argued that it
was protected from court action by a law of 1881 that makes French
newspapers and magazines immune from action if the content is
deemed defamatory more than three months after publication.
However, the Paris court ruled that when a newspaper article is
also published on a web site, it becomes a new publication that is
permanently accessible, and any breach of defamation law is a
continuing breach. The court said that because the internet allows
individuals to look for information at any time, the clock for the
three month limitation period only starts running when the
information is removed from the web site.
The president of Réseau Voltaire, Thierry Meyssan, and his son
Raphaël, the site’s webmaster, said they were shocked by the
judgement. They have no right to appeal but are appealing for
parliament to look into the law to avoid the threat this presents
to archiving any articles on web sites.
A French media lawyer, Eric Borghini, told French newspaper
Libération that the objective of the three month rule was to stop
magazines, newspapers and editors being inundated with actions and
to balance the rights of individuals with the right to freedom of
expression.
The principle has been extended to new mediums, such as TV,
without changing the 19th Century Act yet the French court has in
this decision refused to extend it to the internet. The lawyer
questioned why a continuing web publication should be treated
differently to a book in a library. The judgement appears to say
that the difference is the accessibility of the internet.
In the UK, the rules on bringing such actions look to when the
publication in question came to the attention of the person
alleging defamation; from that point, the person has a certain time
to bring his or her action. UK law does not rely on the date of
publication itself, but nor does it distinguish between on-line and
off-line publications in doing so.
The US has a one year limitation for publications. However, in a
defamation case brought by a New York civil servant, the court said
that there is no rational basis to distinguish between an article
on paper and its electronic equivalent.
Speaking about the French decision, Jon Fell of OUT-LAW.COM
commented, “It’s extraordinary that the courts would treat on-line
and off-line publications differently from the point of view of
determining whether an article could give rise to an action.”
