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French Court Rules That Facebook Can Now Be Sued in France (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Paris court of appeal has ruled in favor of a French complainant whose account was suspended, because he linked to an image of the 1866 Gustav Courbet nude 'L'Origine du monde', currently residing at the Musee d'Orsay. The appeals court not only agreed that the user's suspension by Facebook constitutes censorship, but the ruling itself negates Facebook's insistence that all legal challenges take place in its native California.
Facebook could have just put a fig leaf over the offending parts...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is one of those extremely rare times where we hear about someone outside of the U.S.A. suing a company.
At a very basic level, here's the deal. If you're going to operate as a multi-national company, and you're going to offer and promote your services around the globe, then you need to be responsible for and liable to the laws of the land in each of those territories. If you operate in France and you violate the law in France, then you should be subject to penalty in France.
You don't get to shuffle all of your American tax liability through a double Dutch Sandwich with an Irish muffin, or whatever the hell it is, and simultaneously force French legal complaints to be arbitrated in California. You can't have it both ways.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
So, what happens if the FB lawyers don't show?
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Women should not be treated as sex objects. This isn't 1866 anymore! Grow up Gustav. Put some clothes on her and teach her to code!
If Facebook hosts servers in France, they should answer to French law. If not, it is really a French citizen using a foreign service, and it should only be held accountable to the laws for where they are based.
rises against feudalism.
Someone doesn't get out much....the French are famous for suing companies.
Or simply shutdown facebook.fr and the users will just goto facebook.com. It's not like Facebook is netflix and will suffering crippling latency if French users' bits have to go through a cable under the ocean.
Imagine all the people...
Always ahead of USA on giving people freedom.
And don't forget stop to make business in France (no more adds for French companies).
According to the article, the court didn't say anything about the alleged censorship. It just ruled that the clause in Facebook's terms and conditions that all lawsuits had to take place in California was invalid.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
They have more than 20 millions users in France. Facebook is probably better off paying a few lawyers to modify their ToS.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
The EU. Consumers can sue EU companies in their home country.
How much money does 20 millions users in France translate to?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's the EU. The non tracking comes from a court in Belgium (and it's good practice to stop doing it in the whole EU, because it's obviously in compatible in concept with the old and new privacy directives, it's just the first country what a court has ruled).
French consumers can sue any EU company at home.
Furthermore you have the issue that a number of EU countries are critical to popular tax dodges.
Last I saw the painting, two years ago, it was hinging in London's National Gallery.
The only principle here is, if a business is generating revenue in a country, then that revenue can be targeted in a civil suit. The company can not turn around and claim somehow that it should be allowed to make money in a country but simultaneously not be held accountable for how it makes money in that country. To pretend to claim so is just so much legal bullshit. It is bad enough when you have global tax fraud on trillions of dollars of income and the pain, death and suffering that causes in the crippling of social services and the break down of infrastructure, now they are corruptly fighting to not be held legally accountable for their actions when they are done by remote control. All the money and no responsibility, corporations are behaving like out of control toddlers, screaming for more all of the time now.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
US users value at between $13.62 and $37.98 annually, each. Even at 100 to 1, you'd be at .12*20 = $2.4M a year, and 100 to 1 is probably very low in a G8 country like Fronce.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Thanks for the info!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
A private company sued for censorship... lol.
1) Fuck Facebook
2) Fuck Facebook in the eye.
3) Fuck Facebook in the eye with a broken bottle, but don't they just serve up content to French people? What is their liability here?
Someone's going to bring up the privacy implications, but can we for one second take some responsibility for ourselves?
This little Frenchman is upset because Facebook isn't letting him host content on their servers. What is his expected remedy here? If YOU owned a site and BOFH'd it and ruled with an iron fist, would you accept some pissant crying to city fucking hall about it?
Fuck Facebook, but fuck this whole situation and everyone involved, too. My server. Fuck off. When you cut me a check to host your hairy pussy festival, then you can sue me.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
In case you're wondering:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
The painting is a very realistic depiction of a squirrel sitting in a woman's lap.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They have more than 20 millions users in France. Facebook is probably better off paying a few lawyers to modify their ToS.
The issue isn't the cost of lawyers fees to draft a new ToS. The issue is that the ToS which conforms to France's requirements would fundamentally change the nature of social media. In the present case, a user can sue Facebook because Facebook decided an uploaded image violated their ToS. If Facebook caves to French demands, then it loses the ability to control what content appears in their site. What if an image they are required under French law to allow is considered illegal in another jurisdiction? This is why it makes sense for all lawsuits to be adjudicated in one place, i.e. California. Otherwise Facebook might find itself in an impossible situation.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Get a life by getting off Facebook. I did, and you can to.
And going on strike.
How much money does 20 millions users in France translate to?
A shit ton of people in one of the world's most important countries. France isn't insisting Facebook change its worldwide TOS, but it does insist they change their TOS for France, which is not unreasonable at all. The world is not California, move out and you encounter different people with different philosophies. Between the constant complaining of why the world isn't as sympathetic to them as the US, the billion dollar tax dodges in a country they don't even pretend to be stationed in, their shifty user policies, and overall just horrible culture in general, Facebook doesn't really do a lot to make me feel sympathy for a country standing up for its citizen's rights. I suppose we've all forgotten what that's like in this age.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I am truly shockd that no one has called you a communist yet. Corporations are important!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Facebook France can have one set of rules, everyone else can have another, and those "special" rules can be enforced at the border to prevent cross border issues. Corporations are fully able to limit content by region, netflix does it every day.
The people working for Facebook are very smart. They can figure out how to attach a freaking tag to an image so that it displays for users from countries whos TOSes it doesn't violate.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Using 'people' as a currency/money is kind of creepy.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Not at the same time though, that's been tried by the Italians but they never got it to work.
And going on strike.
If you lookup ILO numbers, you see that french workers go on strike less than EU average. The point is that french strike are often massive, national-scale and aimed at the government, which make them very visible.
French court wants to have jurisdiction over what resides on a server physically located in California? Cookie? What if China asked for the same prerogative? This is precisely why the controlling bodies of the Internet must continue to be under US jurisdiction. Imagine someone like North Korea having a say in what can be on the Internet.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Using 'people' as a currency/money is kind of creepy.
Is "potential customers" more appealing then? That's what (successful) business's have always called the general populace, and it wasn't creepy before.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Facebook is not a European company. They have infrastructure in some European contours, that's it.
The French sometimes strike for silly nonsense.
For example: Makers of cheap Frog wine (vin Ordinair) went 'on strike' to protest that they were being put out of business by better cheap wine from overseas.
Think about that. Your product is crap, you customers prefer a cheaper better product. Do you: (Adopt the technology that is making cheap wine better OR Go on strike)? If you're frogish, strike it is.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Easily solved by making Frog advertisers buy their Facebook ads in another country.
I suppose the frogs could go after the advertisers. But they really prefer to sue overseas companies.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If the problem is competition from foreign workers with much lower wages, it makes sense to ask the government to use tariffs or taxes to average competition. After all, the government is supposed to be there to protect its citizens.
french advertisers should pay for their ads in a different country, then. and forgo french taxes, too.
No, the problem is that the likes of E&J have made making cheep industrial scale wine into a science. It's much better than is was even 20 years ago.
The frog cheap wine makers still do it the old fashioned way, right down to an average 2 flies per bottle in the sediment.
With robotic pickers, wine making isn't labor intensive at all.
The fact is that 200+ years ago the french were the only people who could make really good wine. Now anybody can do it and the french are reduced to babbling about slate bedrock somehow making wine better.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I am not sure why you have an obsession with wine. Wine worker strikes are quite uncommon.
It was an example of a crazy frog strike. Business owners can't generally strike.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Business owners can't generally strike
SMB owners do sometime strike in France, when they request some action from the government. And farmers strike very often for the same reason.