Olivier Sasserath and Philippe Laurent both contributed to the latest issue of the journal Auteurs & Media (2025/4), published by Larcier-Intersentia.
Olivier Sasserath published a case note on a GDPR based criminal court case against a journalist for disclosure of vaccinal status of a politician amidst the COVID-crises. Olivier’s note discusses the interplay between GDPR and freedom of expression, with a focus on journalists: when does an infringement of GDPR rules constitute a criminal offence ? What are the possible defences ? How to balance the rules regarding data processing under the GDPR and freedom of expression ? —all increasingly sensitive questions.
Philippe Laurent authored a case note on the Dalloz/Forseti decision, focusing on unfair competition, unlawful comparative advertising, and the use of misleading domain names. Even if the analysis examines publishing practices in the “pre–open data” era, some lessons learned are timeless : putting on the market a service based on a database that has been created without respecting the applicable laws could qualify as unfair competition, and the provider of such service cannot legally compare it with 100% legit offerings. One of the main issues was indeed that, to build its database, the defendant collected case law decisions without respecting the specific process provided by French law (whereas the claimants did). The Defendant also registered domain names based on official court names (such as “cassation.fr”), which the court qualified as “misleading”.
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