BF2S Forums Wow, Freedom Just Died a little in France.

ATG wrote:

I find this to be a rather extreme restriction of freedom. What gives?

That's exactly what it is. This is a seriously fucked up law... Didn't read the article yet, but I cannot imagine how they would try and explain its existence... I guess what gives is that the world is slowly succumbing to the whole fear propaganda. Funny though, I would have thought that something like this would have first appeared somewhere else, not France...

Does anyone have a link to a translated text of the law? I'd like to read it to determine whether it's truly worded to only prohibit acts of violence such as a riot from being filmed, or whether the wording is vague and can be applied to acts of police brutality.

You have to remember that just because a law is supposed to only stop one problem (Filming riots), it may be worded vaguely to apply to other acts (Police Brutality).

ATG wrote:

I serious wasn't making this to inspire French bashing.

I find this to be a rather extreme restriction of freedom. What gives?

I agree, it is very important to make sure the police don't have uncontrollable power, if anything recording what the police do should be encouraged.

sergeriver wrote:

Elamdri wrote:

Does anyone have a link to a translated text of the law? I'd like to read it to determine whether it's truly worded to only prohibit acts of violence such as a riot from being filmed, or whether the wording is vague and can be applied to acts of police brutality.

You have to remember that just because a law is supposed to only stop one problem (Filming riots), it may be worded vaguely to apply to other acts (Police Brutality).

It basically says you cant film a violent act, except you are a journalist.

Well, obviously, but what I mean does it spell out what a violent act is?

It sounds like a law that looks on the surface to be a way of prohibiting snuff, happy slapping etc. but if strictly adhered to can compromise the rights of 'guerilla film makers' (people who exercise their right to film and monitor people in authority in order to have transparency in how they conduct themselves e.g. the police). Possibly it wasn't intended to end up being used this way or possibly it WAS intended to act this way but was dressed up as a 'let's do something about happy-slapping' law? I'll be interested to see how this one plays out...

=OBS= EstebanRey wrote:

At first I was astonished about this until I really thought about it.  “Happy Slapping” is a sad fad here amongst teenagers so to get rid of that seems like a good thing to do.  Even when the person filming is innocent though, they could be putting themselves and others in danger if they go after that “big story” on their camera phones; so again kind of makes sense.

I think this is more about getting rid of irresponsible Jackass-style imitators that post their crap on Youtube than stopping people filming the police doing stuff they shouldn’t.  It seems to me the writer of the article focussed on that too strongly and referenced historical American events (Rodney King) when talking about France (where no major Police brutality stories come to mind).  I doubt if a major terrorist event occurred in France or Police using unnecessary violence and it was caught on film, I’d be very surprised to see that person prosecuted.

P.S Think about it this way, have you ever watched amateur video of an incident and thought “why is the guy filming this and not helping out?”  Probably because he’d rather be a star on Youtube than a Good Samaritan half the time.

I agree with you that happy slapping is something that needs be tackled in society but this law, whether intentionally or not, still runs the risk of muzzling the public and putting more power in the hands of the authorities. There was a story on the English news just last night about a young woman (who looked like a total knacker/Chav/white trash to be quite honest) who was hit full force five times by a male police officer; the incident was caught on CCTV in this case. Now even if she was a scumbag no woman can take five full force blows from a guy and have that be called reasonable force, if there were no footage of it the incident wouldn't even be questioned. Freedom of speech should be paramount, freedom to present facts, freedom to record facts. Surely there must be laws elsewhere to tackle the problem of happy slapping. It seems stupid and pointless to pass a law to try and control internet content. I mean the bigger name websites are going to be more vigilant over their content anyway as they usually have commercial interests to look out for and the smaller websites aren't gonna give a shit ..that's the whole point of the internet, virtual anonymity and no regulation.