Free Speech in France Decided on a Case-by-case Basis

Apparently a restaurant owner in France has successfully sued a blogger/critic for hurting his business.

I would have thought that blogging under one’s own name and from a site with a reputation to maintain, non-anonymously, would guard against some of the worst tendencies of the Internet, but in this case the blogger’s choice to use her real name and make it possible to find her is in effect being punished.  Not for the first time, I wonder whether tort law inadvertently creates some pretty perverse incentives.

[An anonymous French lawyer] added that, in French law, this type of decision would not create legal precedence.

Not sure that’s how incentives work.

Read the whole thing from the BBC.

Hat tip to the Arcturus Project (warning: language).