Philippe Mouron

Aix-Marseille Université | AMU · Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Droit des Médias et des Mutations Sociales (EA 4328)

Article 16 of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive provides that "Member States shall ensure, where practicable and by appropriate means, that broadcasters reserve for European works a majority proportion of their transmission time".

The Directive hasn't provided anything about the possibilities of subtitling/dubbing foreign programs and movies. It is a controversial issue, according, on one side, to the objective of multilingualism, which supposes to encourage subtitling, and, on the other side, to the will of protecting national identity, for which the dubbing is an appropriate way. That's why it seems that this article has been transposed in different ways by EU members.

For example, Romania recently excluded dubbing of foreign programs (http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2011/7/article38.en.html). On the contrary, French Law is very poor on that point. A 1994 act provided that television and radio shall use French in their programs, with some exceptions for foreign programs. The problem is that the scope of these exceptions is very limited or not defined at all. So, most of the foreign programs have been dubbed in French medias.

What do you know about it ? Do you have any example of such kind of Laws in your country ?

Philippe

French copyright law grants a right of posthumous publication for non-published works. This right belongs to the right owners or successors of the author during the 70 years following the year of his death. Beyond this period, this right belongs to the person who just owns a tangible copy of the work and invests in its publication. In that case, this right is granted for 25 years.

It is important to remember that the work shall have never been displayed to the public. In a recent case, a French Court decided that the discoverers of prehistoric paintings were not entitled to this right, because such works have already been displayed at least 23000 years ago !

Is there a similar right in your copyright Law ? Do you have any examples of its use ?

Thanks.

Philippe

Open hardware licenses try to apply the principles of Open source movement to physical artifacts. According to most of the sources of informations, a lot of projects seem to have been developed under an Open hardware license. But it is difficult to know how successful they are. The most famous is certainly the Arduino microcontroller board.

How about the others ? Do you know some examples of (successful) Open hardware projects ? And what are their business models ?

Thanks.

Philippe

Open hardware or Open source hardware licenses try to apply the principles of Open source movement to physical artifacts. These licenses rely on the sharing of the documentation related to these objects. Users can use or modify the documentation, but also make, modify or distribute the object by their own ways.

The TAPR Open hardware license and the CERN Open hardware license are certainly the most famous.

Do you know any other license of that kind ? Where to find a documentation about it ?

Thanks.

Philippe

I'm interested in the cases of linguistic similarity between trademarks, especially in the european field. This kind of similarity consists in translating a trademark into a foreign word with a same meaning, or using a foreign word which spelling or pronunciation is very close to those of the first one. Of course, we must verify the identity or similarity of the goods or services covered by the trademarks in the same country. Moreover, consumers must be able to understand both of the languages in the case of a similar meaning.

I've found several examples of that kind of similarity in Europe.

What do you know about it ?

Thanks !

Philippe

This right has been enshrined in Canadian Copyright Act since 1988. It has also been judicially enforced in France. Unfortunately, it still remains not applied in many cases. The main trouble, for the artists, is to deal with the owner of the support of the work.