Éric Zemmour sentenced for "copyright infringement" in his campaign clip

Europe 1 with AFP 5:17 p.m., March 4, 2022, modified at 5:19 p.m., March 4, 2022

Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was sentenced on Friday for "copyright infringement" after the unauthorized use of film images in his candidacy announcement clip, according to the judgment whose AFP has got copy.

Eric Zemmour, his Reconquest party!

and one of his relatives, François Miramont, are ordered to jointly pay a total of 70,000 euros to the plaintiffs.

Eric Zemmour's entourage indicated that he would appeal this conviction.

Film extracts in the campaign clip

Among them, the Gaumont and EuropaCorp companies, the directors Luc Besson and François Ozon, the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD) or the beneficiaries of the director Henri Verneuil and the writer and screenwriter Jacques Prévert.

They had assigned Éric Zemmour and his movement in mid-January for "counterfeiting" and "infringement of moral and patrimonial rights".

In question, the unauthorized use of extracts from the films

by Luc Besson (1999),

by Henri Verneuil (1962),

by

François Ozon (2012),

Marcel Carné (1938) and the documentary

(2011) in the clip announcing Éric Zemmour's candidacy for the presidential election.

>> READ ALSO

- Presidential: After Macron, Eric Zemmour in turn addresses the French

The clip will no longer be broadcast with these extracts

This ten-minute clip, broadcast live on various channels on November 30, has been viewed more than three million times on YouTube.

In addition to the sums to be paid in compensation for the damage of "copyright infringement" and "attack on moral rights", the Paris court ordered that the clip should no longer be broadcast with the extracts in question.

This decision must be applied within 7 days, under penalty of a penalty of 1,500 euros per day of delay thereafter.

On January 27 during the hearing, where the far-right candidate was not present, his lawyer Me Olivier Pardo had castigated an attempt at "censorship" and defended the use of video extracts "in the context of a short quotation", claiming the inadmissibility of the procedure.

"Gaumont and EuropaCorp do not play politics, they make popular cinema, and we have never granted permission to use excerpts from any party," replied the lawyer for the production companies, Me Thierry Marembert.

"We would have refused everyone (...) but being associated with someone who has extreme ideas is an additional prejudice," he added.

Gaumont was asking for 25,000 euros in damages for the rights to the film "A monkey in winter", an additional 25,000 euros with EuropaCorp for "Jeanne d'Arc", and the authors and beneficiaries 5,000 euros each for moral rights.

In addition, several media, including Agence France-Presse, had strongly protested against the unauthorized use of their images among the 144 extracts used in the clip, without going as far as legal proceedings.