p2pnet.net News:- France’s online media are facing what could be a new reality.

This week an amendment to a hotly debated French law puts every French web news site under threat.

It aims to radically extend the deadline under which the author of an French article can be sued for defamation from three months to … forever.

Since 1881, the time limit for someone wanting to file an official complaint alleging defamation has been set at three months.

Now the senate has removed the three-month clause.

Senator René Trégouët, a member of the centre-right party UMP, sponsored the amendment of Article 2 of the law because he said the three-month rule wouldn’t be respected on the Internet.

France’s professional journalists don’t agree.

“It weakens a fundamental principle of liberty of the press”, says the Online Services Editors Group (GESTE), in a press release. And the major syndicate for magazines and information press, the SPMI, claims news site wouldn’t be able to be tackled to put out their archives, “which is obviously incompatible with the public interest”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also criticized the amendment.

“A news editor could be sued for defamation because of an article written many years ago”.

Trégouët tried to calm fears, saying the amendment won’t apply to online articles previously published in newspapers. But, “this leads to discrimination between offline and online press”, warned Arnaud Valette, administrator of the GESTE, interviewed by the daily Liberation.

The amendment isn’t the first controversial ruling to impact Net activities in France.

The Loi sur la Confiance de l’Economie Numérique (LEN, literally “Numerical Economy Trust Act”) is meant to compel ISPs to act as censors by having them monitor and ban “illicite, discrimatory, antiracial or pornographic” content.

Launched by the ‘customer defense association’ Odebi, an online petition has gathered some 13,700 signatures by now, and the senate did pay attention to the public
reaction. But sadly, in the process, it added another point of litigation.

This is the first p2pnet report from Thuan Huynh, a freelancer based in Paris, France, who’s going to keep an eye on what’s happening in Europe. He’s written for the news agency Transfert.net and daily economical news site, Le Journal du Net.

Welcome, Thuan : )