FRENCH BLOGGER WINS DEFAMATION CASE
Christophe Grébert of MonPuteaux.com won a legal victory on Friday when a court in Paris ruled in his favor in a defamation suit brought against him by the mayor of Puteaux, a wealthy suburb of Paris. See France 2 here, and a long post at Le Blog Finance here. The mayor will appeal.
The mayor sued Grébert for publishing excerpts of an article from Le Parisien that the mayor said were defamatory. The court also ruled in Le Parisien's favor.
Le Monde has an article (Blogs citoyens : à l'Ouest, du nouveau) that seems to show how counterproductive the mayor's efforts have been. Grébert himself has helped create six more blogs commenting on various aspects of life in Puteaux and the area; over a dozen politicians have gotten into the act, and others have followed.
For anyone interested in the legal issues involved, Grébert has the relevant text of the court's decision here.
For some brief background on Grébert in english, go here and here. Grébert collected donations for his legal fees via paypal, his appeal was picked up by BoingBoing here
1 Comments:
It seems like the mayor's case "should" (by my standards) have been simply frivolous and dismissed out of hand -- the guy just excerpts a critical newspaper article about the mayor and gets sued? Despite the favorable verdict, this seems like the Naumann "verknallt" case to me: European officials can get away with a lot of speech suppression, either directly or via the threat of costly litigation.
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