French court distinguishes defamation on-line from off-line

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.”