France continues downhill, in terms of civil liberties:

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.

This very scary. I hope that the worshipers of foreign decisions on the US Supreme Court don't find it appealing.

[Update in the late afternoon]

I just noticed this peculiar wording:

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists.

Does that mean that people can only film or broadcast acts of violence by professional journalists?

Every megalomaniac in hell is probably dancing in a circle at the news.

Wasn't there a case in New Jersey where a guy was arrested because his home security camera videotaped the police harassing him and his son?

Wasn't there a case in New Jersey where a guy was arrested because his home security camera videotaped the police harassing him and his son?

Yes there was, but what's the point here? Are you comparing police abuse of power with a law on the books? Or, are you noting the value of filming such activity?

They're not being fascist goons, you know. It's just the usual mommyism gone wild. The idea is to be able to bring criminal charges against folks who distribute stuff like this or even this. I'm kind of OK with that, although I'd just have such folks shot out of hand. No need to waste time on a trial, since they usually sign their name proudly to their work.

And before we get all proud of ourselves for not being down in the gutter like those wretched French, let's recall in the United States it's equally illegal to distribute a film of two 17-year-olds having consensual sex, for much the same reason.

Is the French government really after Jules Citoyen and his phone-camera blogging of police violence? I doubt it. In the first place, if the government is truly out to get you they have way more efficient means than harassing you about getting a license to blog (the IRS comes to mind). Why use a peashooter on a mosquito when you've got a 155mm artillery gun at hand?

In the second, it's like spattering raindrops. The entry costs for blogging are so low that there are potentially millions, even in France. You'd have to be a doofus politician to tink about trying to suppress this instead of recruiting it, a la MoveOn.org, for your own agenda.

Which is probably what the guy quoted -- a traditional media/think-tank type -- is up to. Really, I expect the idea here is to scare the little blogger into thinking he needs to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with big traditional media in defending the latter's privileged status in the law. Who's really most afraid of citizen bloggers? Whose lunch is being stolen by the blogging legions? The question answers itself, practically.

They're not being fascist goons, you know. It's just the usual mommyism gone wild. The idea is to be able to bring criminal charges against folks who distribute stuff like this or even this.

Carl, did you miss this part of the story?

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

My first thought is that this is the French. There's probably a journalists union behind it all.

This reminds me of accounts I have read over the last 7 years of French government attempts to silence politically incorrect bloggers.

Does this exempt government security cameras? Or any surveillance cameras? Jean-Paul Squarebadge isn't a professional journalist, after all.

Rand, I didn't miss it, but did you miss the critical last two words in the sentence?

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet.

(Cohet is earlier identified as "spokesman for French on1ine civil liberties group Odebi".)

In other words, the statement you're seeing as a factual observation about the intentions of the French National Assembly is actually the unverified, uninformed opinion of a spokesman for an interest group that has a fundraising interest in maximizing the scariness of the new law.

You might as well take as fact the EFF's opinion on what Congress really meant to do by passing the DCMA, or believe Cory Doctorow's opinion about what Microsoft's real purpose is in supporting DRM.

Now if the article had quoted an actual French legislator as to the purpose of the legislation, or even found language in the law that explicitly said or even implied targeting citizen journalists, I'd say there was a case to be made. But we're asked to believe those canny French legislators drafted a law to target citizen journalists that says no such thing in its actual text. (Presumably they can count on French courts to correctly read between the lines...?)

So as it is, I see this as pure FUD from two groups (the French EFF equivalent and big media) who have something to gain by demonizing government in this area.

I'm not saying it's nuts to think government might like to muzzle citizen journalists...no, wait a minute, I guess I do think that's nuts. Government has little to fear from citizens with cameras, except in police states where underground samizdat can threaten the stability of the regime.

In a generic democracy, big media is much more dangerous to government, because the decisions of a fairly few people (e.g. Bill Keller at the New York Times) can dramatically alter the perception of the government, or its projects For example, objectively speaking the war in Iraq is going much better than the Second World War in the Pacific was going in late 1944. But a relatively few people at the top of big media corporations decided in the first case to present it as a failure, and in the second as a success. In both cases that had significant effects on the government's abilities to get things done. So I think government would actually much prefer to see big heirarchical power structures like the New York Times Corporation replaced with the equivalent news-gathering power of thousands of citizen journalists. Citizen journalists are not rivals for national power, after all, unlike the editors of big papers, or the owners of chains of TV stations. They're not competing for the power to set the national agenda.

I'm not saying it's nuts to think government might like to muzzle citizen journalists...no, wait a minute, I guess I do think that's nuts. Government has little to fear from citizens with cameras, except in police states where underground samizdat can threaten the stability of the regime.

Carl, there have been recent cases here of police harassing, falsely arresting, and confiscating cameras from uninvolved citizens videoing police activities.