This decision was eagerly awaited following Microsoft's appeal against the search warrant ordering it to provide the contents of a non-US customer's email account hosted in Ireland. In December 2013, at the request of federal prosecutors, a US federal judge issued a search warrant for Microsoft's email account in ... Read more
No access by a beneficiary to the personal data of a deceased person In a decision dated 8 June 2016, the Conseil d'Etat ruled on the definition of "data subject" within the meaning of Article 2 of the 1978 Data Protection Act (Loi informatique et libertés - LIL), ruling that it could not include the successor in title of a deceased person. ... Read more
After four years of intensive work, the European Parliament adopted the new Regulation on the protection of personal data on 14 April 2016. The parliamentarians wanted the regulation to be "future-proof", in particular by being neutral in terms of technologies and adapted to Big Data, in order to be applicable to ... Read more
In a ruling handed down on 12 February 2016, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that the jurisdiction clause in Facebook's general terms and conditions of use, which gives jurisdiction to the courts of the State of California (US), constitutes an unfair clause. The Court of Appeal ruled that: the Internet user who sued Facebook to obtain jurisdiction over his ... Read more
In a ruling dated 14 January 2016, the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance (High Court) ruled that it had jurisdiction in a dispute concerning the infringement of a French trademark by an Italian company on its Italian website. The Court found that the Italian website was aimed at a French audience and therefore presented a ... Read more
On 2 and 3 February, the G29, a group made up of the various European supervisory authorities (including the CNIL in France), assessed the consequences of the Court of Justice's decision invalidating the Safe Harbor agreement on transfers of personal data from the European Union to the United States. The G29 ... Read more
The necessary distinction between creation of the constituent elements and specific investment In a ruling dated 12 November 2015, the Cour de cassation reiterated that, in order to justify a rejection of database protection, it is not sufficient to consider that the producer of a database has not provided proof of specific investment to ... Read more
In a ruling handed down on 3 November, the Court of Cassation held that the publication director of a personal contribution space could not rely on the outsourcing of the moderator function to a service provider, or on the provisions relating to the criminal liability of website hosts, in order to absolve himself ... Read more
In a judgment of 8 September 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the French decree of 31 December 2008, which generally prohibits advertisements offering price reductions without displaying the reference price, did not comply with the European directive on unfair commercial practices. This is because ... Read more
In a judgment handed down on 1 October, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on the law applicable to the controller of personal data, adopting a broader concept of the notion of establishment. For the record, the data controller is the natural or legal person who decides on the purpose for which the data is ... Read more
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