I guess my post was too long. Yes, France could enforce a judgment against Meta by leaning on the French division of Meta. The question is, on what legal basis this would happen.
They are suing because of something that happened in the US, right? What argument is there to apply French law?
That’s not merely politically contentious. It is explicitly against internation law; treaties that France has signed.
Oh wow. That’s not a small misunderstanding.
Law is basically territorial. French police can arrest people in France. If, say, Russian police tries to arrest someone in France, then it is, at best, a criminal kidnapping and, at worst, an act of war. Extradition hearings are a thing because a country decides on its own terms, by its own laws, whether to hand over people to another jurisdiction.
Sovereignty is a big deal for countries. If you think about it in terms of kidnapped or armed, uniformed foreigners running around, then you understand why.
If France were to send out fines to people in the UK for driving on the wrong side of the road, then the UK would refuse to collect them. France could collect fines for something people have done in the UK only if these people pass through France. Obviously, that would cause serious international tension.
In the same way, if France awards special privileges to its citizens that allow them to collect money from people around the world, other countries would not entertain such demands. What France can do, is make laws that force French residents to pay money to people around the world. That’s how copyright law works.
There are international treaties on intellectual property. Signatory countries generally agree to have certain minimal standards in their laws. They also agree to treat all nationals equal. So, France couldn’t make special privileges for its citizens. They also agree that their copyright laws only apply in their territories.
So, I don’t see quite what a French court could be doing here, that would be compatible with international law.
What? Did you reply to the wrong post?
I wonder what their argument is. French copyright law governs France. People in the US have no obligation to follow it. Might as well fine people in the UK for driving on the wrong side of the road.
Rich people have staff that knows all their secrets; assistants, bodyguards, maids, drivers, … Their staff might abuse their position to steal, blackmail, or even sign book deals. They still have the staff.
When AI agents become useful for normal people, normal people will use them.
These ideas are all fundamentally misguided. Let’s take a step back what we are trying to do here: We want to create a system so that the government can withhold certain information from certain people. That’s both difficult and dangerous.
PornHub’s idea requires cooperation from the hosters. You are not likely to get global agreement on that. So you will still need to do something about those foreign sites, such as blocking them.
At that point, such a law would achieve 2 things:
Blocklists that parents can install on their devices already exist, so there would be no change in that regard.
Of course, minors have no trouble circumventing such software. They have plenty of time and they are horny. You can’t win. The only faint hope might be to include such features at deeper levels, similar to existing DRM schemes. This would be ripe for abuse by bad actors or governments. It certainly would be used against the consumer by the copyright industry and tech monopolies; just like existing DRM schemes.
So we really should ask why we would want to walk further down this expensive, hostile, and dangerous path. Are we afraid that masturbation causes blindness?
Yes, that’s where the trouble starts. I think later treaties reinforce the principle. I’d really like to know how the rights owners argue to get around that.