The launch video of the far-right polemicist candidacy contains many extracts from movies, used without authorization. The candidate was assigned to court Thursday, January 27 for “counterfeiting copyright”.
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“Eric Zemmour is not pursued here for his words or his ideas, but for his actions.” From the outset, Thierry Marembert, a lawyer of the Gaumont production company and director Luc Besson, wished to evacuate the argument of the political trial. It is a conflict around the copyright that must decide on Thursday, January 27, the 3 e from the Paris court. At issue, the campaign clip published on November 30, 2021, on Youtube by Eric Zemmour and his teams. For ten minutes, the polemicist, sitting at a desk in front of a micro – in an allusion to the call of 18 June of General de Gaulle -, recited his speech, while hundreds of images extracted from news videos, but also movies or archive images passed.
The decoders of the world had counted not less than 114 “borrowed” sequences by the candidate’s campaign team, without the one bother to request the authorization to the rights holders of these images. Among these sequences, scenes of the film Jeanne d’Arc (1999), from Luc Besson, or the classic a monkey in winter (1962), of Henri Verneuil, of which Gaumont has the rights.
“Never did Mr. Zemmour have borne to contact one of the rights holders,” said Darembert, nor his team did not bother to mention credits to these images. For the lawyer, if Luc Besson has “never granted extracts” of his films “to political parties”, the harm here is all the more serious as “Mr. Zemmour has abrasive ideas”. “He was sentenced three times, and no later than [January 17], for provocation to racial hatred.” The polemicist was sentenced to 10,000 euros for his remarks on isolated miners “thieves, murderers , violers, held in 2020. He appealed this decision.
“Casualure” and “contempt”
And the Council of Mr Besson to castigate the non-response of the candidate, who mentioned a “quarrel of lawyers”, like his team, who had secured just after the diffusion of the clip that “everything [had] been] rule “. “It would be good that when we want to be President of the Republic, we are interested in copyright,” says Marembert.
He asks 25,000 euros of repair by film, as well as 5 000 euros for Luc Besson, who “believes in the exchange between the peoples” and is therefore “to light years of what can represent Eric Zemmour. ” At his side, M e Olivier Chatel, council of the Society of authors and dramatic composers, has also denounced the “casualness” and the “contempt” of the teams of Eric Zemmour: “when We are a candidate for the supreme judiciary, one must be irreproachable. “
Faced with them, the advice of Eric Zemmour and his party, reconquest!, have denounced a “Cancel Culture” and defended the freedom of expression and the right of quote of a work in this clip, qualified, by them, “press release” of a new kind. “The extracts we are talking about representing seven to eight seconds, has noted M e Olivier Pardo. In our country, we have the right to support a work to say what we mean.” The judgment was made in deliberate on March 4th.