I had to ask the First President of the Paris Court (Premier Président du Tribunal de grande instance de Paris) for the possibility to reveal identification elements and contact information of the people who posted on Instgram using pseudos, based on the article 145 of the Civil Procedure Code. The Judge needed to order Instagram to reveal the data and information concerning these people, as well as the data concerning the modalities of their connexion to Instagram (technical data, IP addresses...) The judge sent this order to the Facebook headquaters (Because Instagram is owned by Facebook), in the United States. Once the data was collected and the persons identified, they were officially assigned on the basis of denigration that caused moral predjudice to my client.
The French law remains applicable as long as the claimant is French, that Instagram is a social network that is accessible in France. The French jurisdiction can be applied from the moment that the language used on the web is French and that the website targets a French audience.
On the web, the French law on Intellectual Property is as applicable as on any other platform. Property Rights correspond to all of the prerogatives that a person posesses over the intellectual work that they have produced. On the Internet, a work will be considered as a reproduction under the article L122-3 of the Intellectual Property Code. It can only be exploited if there the author authorizes it before hand. Otherwise, it will be considered as a civil crime, an infraction (article L335-2 of the Penal Code) that can lead to three years of imprisonment and 300,000 euro fine. The article L. 131-1 of the Penal Code stipulates that any cession of future work is void. In addition, any cession of Intellectual Property rights has to be stipulated in a written document, that necessarily needs to indicate and define all of the conditions under which this Intellectual Property will be numerically exploited. This written document therefore has to stipulate the nature of the rights thus created : exploitation rights, adaptation rights, translation rights... As well as all of the platforms on which the Intellectual Property will be exploited, for own long... Overall, the Intellectual Propety rules imposed by Facebook or Instagram are illegal and oppose the French law.
In France, there are legal provisions for online platforms to suppress any content that would be considered as hate-speech, racist, antisemtic... They are also legal provisions that enable the suppression of nudes when they damage private life (ex. of revenge porn), when they harm human dignity, or when they concern minors (cyberpedophilia). However, artistic nude works are not censored if they are original work that do not fall into the categories that were previously mentionned.
Social networks very often lead to diffamatory acts, the production of counterfeit works or the violation of intellectual property. However, it is very difficult to obtain reparation for a moral predjudice because judges often requiere for it to be proven through tangible pieces, and that despite the cruelty of messages and pictures posted on Instagram. In addition, for artists, it is becoming more and more difficult to claim their intellectual property on Instagram or to have the violation of their intellectual property on Instagram legally recognized. For these reasons, and more broadly, I think that artists could certainly do well without Instagram, and become succesful by meeting people that are not on Instagram. Finally, I do not think that laws can contribute to innovation or creation, nor that they can empower artists.