Last Friday, France’s Constitutional Court approved a law cracking down on violence — well, at least documenting it. According to IDG News Service, the new law “criminalized the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists.”
The law was — apparently — spurred by disturbing stories of people being assaulted randomly solely for the purpose of recording it for entertainment value (a practice known as “happy slapping.”) But the legislation’s reach goes far beyond that — broadly criminalizing the filming of violence by eyewitnesses.
In an unfortunate irony, the decision approving the law was published on the anniversary of the amateur videotaping of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers in 1991. Unless the cameraman were a professional journalist, such recording would now be illegal in the French Republic. The penalty, according to IDG: up to five years in prison, “potentially a harsher sentence than that for the committing the violent act” itself.
It gets worse. Since professional journalists are exempted from the ban, the government has “proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.”
No word yet on the criteria to be used to get France’s approval to report news.
(Thanks to Declan McCullough for the heads up on this.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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