Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 20:38:22 -0500 To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu From: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh) Subject: FC: Cyber Rights Non! -- French Net-Censorship Sender: owner-fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu Attached is a portion of the lead article from today's HotWired on the French government's net-censorship. I'm pleased to say I just received word from a French correspondent that the French "Conseil Constitutionnel" has blocked the part of the law creating "Le Conseil SupÈrieur de la TÈlÈmatique" to decide what should be blocked online. (From what I've been able to gather, that court reviews laws to ensure they're constitutional. On June 27, the Conseil heard arguments from senators that the law violated articles of the French constitution.) I have more on other international net-censorship attempts at: http://www.eff.org/pub/Global/Dispatches/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/international/ -Declan ----------------------------------- Read the full article at: http://www.netizen.com/netizen/ HotWired The Netizen Cyber Rights Non! by Jerome Thorel Paris, 24 July Early last month, at a time of day when typical netsurfers are just hitting their mouse-clicking stride - around 3:30 in the morning - the French Senate voted on the final version of the new Telecommunications Regulation Act. A little-remarked section of the act, introduced as an amendment a few days before, represents the French legislature's first plunge into the digital ocean. It creates a kind of administrative oversight of Internet speech, Web sites, and online services. The law's effect is to create a council - le Conseil SupÈrieur de la TÈlÈmatique (CST) - to dictate or arbitrate guidelines regarding Internet content. It turned out, however, that the move by Telecommunications Minister FranÁois Fillon, sponsor of the French Telecom Act, was a little hasty. France had been shaken this spring by two investigations into pedophilia and Holocaust revisionism (both considered crimes in France) on the Internet. For months, Fillon had promised French Internet service providers that they would no longer bear responsibility for the content they transmit. The law does settle that question. But no one imagined that this guarantee would include as its condition the creation of the CST. To be safe from indictment, ISPs will be obliged to follow CST's guidelines - a policy typical of France's strong tradition of centralized administration. [...] The French Net-regulation bill became law on 7 June - the same week that US federal judges declared the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.... [...] Jerome Thorel, a Paris-based freelance reporter, writes frequently about technology and society. Andy Oram, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, contributed to this article. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- fight-censorship is archived at http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/