Reports are in that the Supreme Court of France has upheld a conviction by the state against French blogger, journalist, and web service provider Olivier Laurelli1 for downloading free and publicly available documents obtained from a Google search. Using a 1929 law criminalising the theft of electricity in combination with the 2009 HADOPI legislation,2 the prosecution has sought 3,000 Euros in damages for Laurelli's procurement of documents from the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) website in 2012. Back in 2013, Laurelli described his court case to date and how he came to find himself in this position on his personal blog.
Laurelli, however, unshaken in his faith in the fiat legal system despite his obvious struggles over the past three years, not to mention similar struggles of others around the world, has said that he intends to bring the case before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.
On the journalism side, Laurelli founded the news site Reflets.info ; on the web services side, he operates the web security firm Toonux ; online, he operates under the alias "Bluetouff" and lists PGP fingerprint 9F9C 7924 EB82 C810 24D5 6143 6985 0860 7991 E873 on his personal blog, though this pseudonym and key aren't registered with either bitcoin-otc (gribble) or bitcoin-assets (assbot) at the time of publishing. ↩
HADOPI is an acronym for "Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des œuvres et la Protection des droits d'auteur sur Internet" and consists of an escalating series of e-mail warnings and ISP-level monitoring of traffic for users found to have infringed upon copyrighted material. ↩
France is getting pretty ridoinculous by now. In general there's an ever-growing gap between the Internet and "society", as misrepresented by the ancient forms, but France seems even less equipped to deal with the situation than the US. Who knew the continental legal system would eventually fail due to its infexibility of all things.