French News Agency Sues Google News 441
n1ywb writes "CNN and others are reporting that 'News agency Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc., alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission. The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.' This means they're suing in America this time, not France, which means Google might actually care if they lose."
AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:2)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:2)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Interesting)
(hint: it's about the same as the probability of Windows XP getting GPL'ed by the end of the year)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that kind of thinking that got SCO in its current position. I honestly don't think AFP has a chance on this one. That's my personal opinion.
Disclaimer: I am not a blah blah blah...
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.
It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.
It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.
And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.
It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.
It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.
And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.
If the facts ar
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Informative)
Quotes from US Code Title 17, 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include
So, right away Google seems cleared. But, lets make it more clear since something like blatant plagiarism of a whole news paper would likely not be protected.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial. Your logic that a non-profit action attracts attention/money isn't relevant. By your logic no celebrity would have access to fair use since their non-profit statements would attract attention to them and conceivably make more money. The test is for if the work itself is commercial. Google News doesn't make money.
Second, Google News is for providing access to news. To claim news is uneducational in general is to ignore what news is. Now, if Google News started quoting from press releases by companies or one of the Government produced "news" releases, you'd have a much stronger argument. Such is propaganda and propaganda is not educational except in the general case that knowing what to look for it in propaganda.
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
The original was news as well.
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google. Just like Slashdot or fark, Google News redirects to pages in a way that if anything *increases* the market for the work. It's unlikely I'd ever even see a fraction of the news papers listed on Google News if it weren't for Google. Google News doesn't replace all these news sites. It's a nexus for finding them.
The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page. They include a small blurb and a link to the original site. While the Google Cache is likely dice, from the perspective of ad revenue being the market provider, search engines in general haven't really been questioned before. Google News is merely a search engine specifically geared towards news. If Google News is commit some illegal act by linking to news stories and including a blurb then so are most store catalogs, search engines, and tons of databases of information (lots of things one makes are copyrighted, after all).
So, I sincerely fear for what such would mean.
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Interesting)
So, right away Google seems cleared.
If some prime minister makes a speech, it's fair use to quote text from t
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Informative)
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
But it ignores the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of that process is that people will look at it, classify it and judge it.
It inherent in attaching a web server. If you don't like it, the best thing to do is unplug the ethernet cable from your web server, and tell people to dial directly (or through Minitel) to your server, because you feel that putting it on the internet places you in a difficult position.
I don't see how you can have it both ways...they want wide exposure, so they place it in the most public place on the planet, then they complain that it isn't viewed in precisely the way they envisioned.
I really don't understand the beef.
Re:But it ignores the obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Informative)
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Now... was this present before or after the lawsuit started, and is google news the same as normal indexing?
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like it was there before (unless they manually modified the TS, which is kinda silly).
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:10:51 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Expires: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:15:51 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:54:38 GMT
ETag: "761b2-4f-421c60ee"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 79
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Interesting)
Google links to publicly accessible content hosted on publicly accessible websites, period.
AFP posts content to their publicly accessible website, and lo and behold it's linked to.
If AFP doesn't like the way they're doing business, then they should change it. I think they'd be hard pressed to be a successful news service though if they refused access to all of their news.
As has already been aluded to, this is so SCO it's not even funny. There is no case.
Now, even given that, maybe the best thing Google could do is abide by the AFP's request. Give them what they wish for. I probably won't even notice their stories disappearing from Google News, but I'm sure they'd notice their disappearing readership.
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't you have a right to tell them to remove the ad?
They have every right to declere their wishes using robots.txt. Why they don't do that is an open question.
Way too many suits like this are nothing more than companies refusing to follow the conventions of the web. It's analogous to the conventions for entering a business. That is, if the door isn't locked, the lights are on, and no sign saying closed is on the door, we presume we may enter freely. It's not reasonable to sue someone for not knoc
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:4, Informative)
However, the CNN article does state that AFP asked to be removed from Google News and that Google did not remove them, thus the lawsuit.
AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:2)
Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple answer - they cant, and arent. Google only has access to the information that AFP is providing to the public *FOR FREE*. If AFP does not want to provide that information free, they can arrange that by making the proper adjustments to their site.
Heck, if they even want to be snippy, and not provide it *just* to Google, it would take 10 minutes with a robots.txt, or a user-agent check, to block Google from accessing their site. It sounds to me they are more interested in suing than in preventing Google from using them. Or perhaps they dont want to block Google from accessing them, but they want to force Google to pay for doing so.
Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:4, Insightful)
AFP is selling content to other site. Those sites put the content they have paid for on the free part of their site. Then Google take those information, and put them for free in google news...
AFP is selling content that you can put on your site to attract a public. But to legaly display this content you have to pay AFP, even if other site are putting this content for free on the web.
Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to copyright, Google has to ask permission to copy from AFP, not from the websites which already paid AFP. And right now, Google isn't copying a small fair use chunk, they are copying 99% of AFP's material.
Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm. So, they want to block Google news from displaying its headlines. those headlines are displayed on the electronic editions of thousands of newspapers and news sites, worldwide. This leads us to 3 options:
1) It's too difficult to ensure AFP headlines are filtered out. Google News is shut down or signigantly neutered.
2) AFP headlines are filtered out. AFP loses market share and relevance
3) (really, a result of 2) News sites avoid AFP like the plague - they don't much like the idea of AFP driving page views *away* from their sites.
AFP's douchitude affects much more than AFP. It affects their customers (the newspapers). It would do them well to remember that.
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:2, Informative)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:2)
Re:AFP will be the ones to lose (Score:5, Informative)
No, wait, you don't understand what AFP is: it is a news provider, like Reuters, they don't really care if people go to their website or not, it is completely marginal in their business. Their job is to sell news (pictures / text) to other media (newspapers, radios, websites etc), which can then use it directly (reprint it) or use it as a basis for more complete, analytical articles.
So AFP does not really care how much coverage their content gets for free, in fact it is threatening as it "devaluates" the content: now anybody (and more importantly, any media) can have access to most of AFP's content minutes after it is broadcast, without paying for the (probably huge) monthly bill newspapers pay to AFP. (medias pay to get the right to access to AFP's network, through specific software and servers).
The fact is that Google is indexing and displaying that content without paying for it. But Google can (rightfully) argue that they are only indexing other websites (ie the newspapers who have paid for AFP content and displaying it as is on their own websites), and that therefore they're not violating any copyright law. But in the eyes of AFP, Google is using their content in an original form, displaying it on their own website, with their own layout.
So both companies have mostly valid arguments.
Yes, But...Maybe Not (Score:3, Informative)
In other words, there aren't any AFP sites for
Security! Security! (Score:5, Insightful)
If Agence France Presse didn't want people to view their content for free...
It's not like Google's impersonating a paid user account to get the information!
Re:Security! Security! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
Two, the wire services are different from most news providers in that there business does not depend primarily on eyeballs driven to their site, but instead subscriptions from other news services to be allowed to redistribute their content -- the right that Google is partly appropriating for free. The NYT cares about end-user eyeballs, but Reuters, AFP, AP and UPI care about newspaper editors.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
Not that I agree with it, but at least that's how I understand it.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, except they did that, RTFA and all that.
From TFA:
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright:
©AFP 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
I think that locks it down properly. Google just violated their copyright by reproducing and publishing their content without consent.
You're right, but... (Score:2)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you put it up on a website without a password, doesn't mean that there are not restrictions on it's use.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not clear to me, though that Google has actually done anything that infringes
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
So, now the google bots must be programmed to read copyright notices on websites?
If they win on that, I'm going to put a cpyright notice on my site in esperanto and then sue google for 47 million dollars.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:3, Informative)
The established and official practice is to put the machine-readable "copyright" into robots.txt.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:2)
2> Even a contract does not trump fair use.
3> Simply by viewing a web page you are making a copy - a reproduction - of the images and other content on the page. Their desires are irrelevant because it is impossible to read their webpage without breaking their licensing terms.
Re:Security! Security! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Security! Security! (Score:5, Informative)
AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews. The result is that AFP content licensed by newspapers winds up on Google News, even though AFP did not allow Google direct access to AFP content.
Google's public now. Lawyers smell blood. (Score:5, Informative)
Google is both suing and being sued by so many parties now it's hard to keep track, as a search on Google will show. [google.com]
One of the cases involving images.google.com [itvibe.com] appears to me to be more of a publicity stunt by the plaintiff.
I think we can expect more such lawsuits.
Damages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Damages? (Score:2)
Hahahaha, nice troll, I'll bite. What about the Google ads? Do you think the companies advertised there get that service for free?
Re:Damages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Damages? (Score:2)
The problem is that too many Slashdotters don't see Google as a commercial company. Sure it's great that they take OpenSource seriously. Sure it's great that they are trying to outdo Microsoft. But they are still a company and they still want to make a profit.
If Google News comes out of beta it wouldn't surprise me if the page would include google ads.
Re:Damages? (Score:2)
Re:Damages? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is important is the preceived lost income by AFP, not Google's possible income by replicating the news.
A possible leverage point for litigation may be if AFP photos were being used beside a headline from another news source. In which case AFP may argue (and IMHO rightfully so) that their photography en
Re:Damages? (Score:3, Insightful)
A better analogy would be that you are an auto rental firm, and Google is telling people that ask that you have the cars they are interested in, and to contact you to rent cars from you. How could this possible be undesirable to you?
In essence they are getting free advertising from Google. Google should apoligize for not charging them, send them a bill, and stop returning hits/links to their news site until the bill is paid.
The importance of non-commerciality (Score:2)
The search engines need a blacklist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The search engines need a blacklist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The search engines need a blacklist (Score:2)
Why would you attack Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why would you attack Google? (Score:3, Informative)
"Without AFP's authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP's photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News web pages," AFP charged in its lawsuit.
AFP said it has informed Google that it is not authorized to use AFP's copyrighted material as it does and has asked Google to cease and desist from infringing its copyrighted work.
AFP alleged that Google has ignored such requests and as of the filing date of the lawsuit "continues in an unaba
Re:Why would you attack Google? (Score:2)
---
I think it is enough that AFP asked Google to remove links to their site from the Google News and were ignored.
"Without AFP's authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP's photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News web pages," AFP charged in its lawsuit.
AFP said it has informed Google that it is not authorized to use AFP's cop
NOTE: News agency != News site (Score:5, Informative)
It's not trivial to filter out press reports from a news agency.
News agencies sell their raw-stories to news sites. Google can easily remove a news site from their news index, but excluding some articles from a news agency appearing on various news sites is difficult...
Re:NOTE: News agency != News site (Score:2)
So, the news agency should be suing the news site for not having robots.txt set up properly, not google. Yes? No?
But to short circuit the whole thing, how about the equivalent of robots.txt be developed for comment fields for all binary files and as a simple code to include in all text files?
Is this
IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe I've been misled, but when a news agency publishes a story, that story can be used and published by others as long as the source is cited. Google cites all of their sources, links to the original source, and essentially are providing pre-search engine usefulness. They're collecting news that people are interested in or has general appeal and displaying it like they would a search, and there's already numerous laws that state it doesn't
Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators (Score:3, Interesting)
If Google does not, then by providing excerpts for a non-editorial, non-educational, and rather commercial purpose they may be unfairly infringing.
Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators (Score:2)
However, if I take a news report and create a precis of it and photocopy it and hand it out to people in the street, I am in the clear as I am using my personal knowledge after reading the article, to create a new article.
There are text tools begining to come in
Sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, it's not.
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
People scheme and scheme of ways to get their site into results returned by Google. It boggles the imagination why anyone would sue for getting for free what so many are willing to go to great lengths to get.
Case will already be over. (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, the court decided it was not Copyright infringement because the original source was provided and given full credit, and some other factors.
Nothing to see here
the GTFO option (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/lawyers.txt (Score:4, Funny)
Disallow:
Reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: AFP is right but Google's lack of ads or even full stories on the page should save them.
I just looked at Google News and noticed there is a photo that goes to a story, but there is no photo on the page it links to. The photo must have come from some other news source and the caption "Boston Globe" got pasted below it as a link.
This is maybe good for layout but is contrary to what a photographer would be used to seeing. It probably got them pissed off.
I doubt Google is knowingly copying from AFP. I think they grab any photos they can find. But they will probably find a lot of quality AFP photos. The problem is you don't know who they got it from. And the lack of attribution. That is how AFP makes their money: Copyright control. And guess what? Google uses the work of AFP photographers to make a more visually interesting page for a service that is both free and worth enough money to make an IPO.
Well, this was bound to happen. AFP can probably prove it was an AFP photo, but cannot prove Google copied it from them (and Google likely didn't). It would be useful to include metadata in the photos as to proper credit, url, and policy.
Probably AFP contacted Google, got rebuffed, and then AFP realized that if they don't fight it they will lose control over their online future. Which is true.
But this is really a search engine - you can't actually read the articles there but need to surf elsewhere - and there are no ads, so it can be said that this is a free service.
Anyway it walks a fine line between a search engine and a publication, and the best thing would be if Google could actually sign a contract with Reuters and AFP say, and show large, high quality photos on their site. They could also pay photographers and writers directly which is of course the next step, when Google really goes for the throat. For now it is just a search engine, and Google should be free to make a dynamic layout any way they want, except that it should show accreditation (if in the photo file itself) at least as a mouseover popup label.
I'm not going to guess the outcome, but hope AFP loses badly, otherwise it will be chilling. They ought to be able to demand that Google not index a photo that has an AFP byline embedded in it, but that too is an interpretation we'll have to wait and see about.
The beginning of end of news agencies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe this isn't a simple issue of publicity or drawing easy cash from Google, but a last attempt to win a juridical last resort against the inevitable death of news agencies?
As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer. Recently, Norway's second largest newspaper Dagbladet [www.db.no] opted out of a new contract with the national news agency NTB [www.ntb.no]. Although they did make a deal with ANB [siste.no], a smaller and cheaper agency, the ratio of articles directly from the agencies seem to fall quite quickly.
And it makes sense. Why pay a lot for content you can receive for free? Journalism in the information world is cheap, because you don't need to travel much to get a good overview. Blogs and online newspapers are much cheaper to make and distribute than paper papers (heh). As journalism and distribution becomes cheaper, the need for agencies diminishes.
So a last resort for the agencies could be making it impossible to aggregate news through portals. They're trying to halt development, to avoid the inevitable, or at least get payed for their inconvenience. I hope they lose, although I'm a little nostalgic on the paper papers behalf too.
Re:The beginning of end of news agencies? (Score:4, Informative)
*sigh* You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron. Because, guess what - real world event don't happen on the web. They happen in the real world (duh!) And you need to have real-world journalists to report on them (double-duh!) They are the primary news source; any website that does not directly employ journalists is, at best, a secondary news source.
The AFP is composed of a few hundred journalists scattered all over the world, who write articles and take pictures on real-world events. The AFP is a major "primary news source". Web-based publications are dependent on AFP and other journalists to produce the content that appears on your screen, even though you don't seem to be aware of this basic fact. Apparently in your world news stories and photographs self-assemble spontaneously from random electronic noise.
Journalists and photographers, believe it or not, need to pay the bills too. So agencies such as AFP sell their stories to publishers (web or paper based), usually in a non-exclusive manner, without redistribution rights. This allows them to pay their journalists, who produce all the hot juicy content that titillates your ocular globes.
I'll make a very simple summary of the case for you:
- Google aggregates articles (and photographs) from public websites, with their permission.
- AFP licenses photographs to websites, without redistribution rights: The websites not allowed to redistribute the picture.
- However, Google harvests AFP-made pictures from websites and happily displays them on GoogleNews.
- AFP says to Google: "Stop that, please"
- Google ignores them
- AFP sues
Got it ?
Thomas-
Send feedback to AFP (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact [afp.com]
You can always use John Doe's mailing address
Yahoo pays AFP for news (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo's AFP news site:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=index2&cid=1504 [yahoo.com]
Google should do what Microsoft does (Score:2)
You avoid the litigation issue of foreign countries at any rate.
AFP (Score:2, Interesting)
A bunch of stupid ass holes.
and yes, I'm french
From the article: (Score:3, Interesting)
So...if they didn't like it, they could have opted out...
Funny how google threatened to sue rss scrapers (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3
the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.
oh the irony
Re:Don't go there! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't go there! (Score:2)
Re:Don't go there! (Score:2)
Re:Don't go there! (Score:3, Insightful)
I fail to see the distinction. If you crawl their website just for the search page, then when I type in search terms that hit on their site in the regular search box I'm going to get the title of their site as a blue link, and some of the text
Re:Don't go there! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sick and tired of these law suits (Score:2)
Re:robots.txt (Score:2)
The Law Doesn't Read that Way (Score:2)
Legally speaking, yes you do, at least in America. Courts has struggled with the question of giving notice by publication, and have eventually come up with the standard of "reasonably calculated to give actual notice, and only in cases where individual notice is impossible or unduly burdensome."
An English language notice is not reasonably calculated to give actual notice, unless they really think there are 50,000 old ladies at Google reading each indexed link. And individual notice would have been easy.
Wondering that myself. (Score:2)
Re:Most web-litigious country? (Score:2)
They're still pissed that Minitel [wikipedia.org] didn't become the standard instead of the Internet.
Re:Most web-litigious country? (Score:2)
You're confused. This is a French news agency we're talking about here, not the French state. Same difference as between SCO and the USA. Not the same thing at all, eh?
Re:Most web-litigious country? (Score:4, Informative)
AFP exists under special charter from the French government, and the AFP's primary client is (drum roll) the French government. The French government is financed by whom? Oh yes, the French taxpayers.
To directly quote Wikipedia, "The primary client of AFP is the French government, which purchases subscriptions for its various services. In practice, those subscriptions are somewhat a subsidy to AFP, which is insecure financially. AFP statutes prohibit direct government subsidies." [wikipedia.org]
AFP could not survive without that cash from the French government, so equating them with the French State is the only reasonable conclusion that can be made.
Not that there is anything wrong with them being, for all intents and purposes, part of the French State, but face it. They are!
A Fix? (Score:2)
Would this work? If not, why not? If not, could it be made to work after a simple tweak?
all the best,
drew
http://www.peercast.org/ [peercast.org]
Re:Napoleonic Code (Score:3, Informative)
So do parts of North America, what's your point? On this side of the pond, it's not the national government that sets the standard for who's flavor of common law a state or province uses.
And while we're on the subject, the Napoleonic Code (nor English Common Law) have any sway on constitutional, criminal or civil law in any meaningful way. That level of law gets trumped by anything, especially laws passed by the legislature, and is