French Digg condemned for user-submitted link
Posted by Monsieur K.
On march 27th, French Digg-like owner Eric Dupin was condemned by a court due to a link posted by one of its users about a rumour of marriage between Australian idol Kylie Minogue and French actor Olivier Martinez.
M. Martinez instantly sued the website (among others), and the judge finally decided that since links on Fuzz.fr were sorted in different categories, M. Dupin was also acting as an editor of the content of his website, and Fuzz was condemned to pay €2500 (around $3900) in total. It's not that much (even if it still represents quite a sum of money, especially if you didn't expect to have to pay that), but that decision could set a precedent in the domain, and that would mean trouble for the French Web 2.0. Big, big trouble. The only solution for companies hosting similar websites would be to set up some kind of human moderation... a lot of work, if you consider the traffic of websites like Digg !
Meanwhile, the French blogosphere just went to war with Olivier Martinez, organising a big (more than 55 000 results on Google) “J'aime pas Olivier Martinez” (“I don't like Olivier Martinez”) campaign, and Fuzz.fr and Eric Dupin's blog received a lot of traffic. Still, I don't really know if it was worth the condamnation.
If this case clears the way to other similar lawsuits, it could really restrain the development of a lot of Web 2.0 companies and projects. What do you think, and do you know of any similar situations in other countries ?
