France Bans Video Bloggers from Covering Violent Crime?

France is making it illegal to shoot or distribute video of violent crimes, unless you're a professional journalist, IDG reports.

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

(...)

The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of "happy slapping," in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker's friends.

It reads as though the potential effect on citizen journalists is an unintended consequence of a well-meaning law. But the story quotes a spokesman for the French online civil liberties group Odebi insisting it's a deliberate effort by French lawmakers to reign in internet speech. If true, France is still playing catch-up.

Link.

__Update: __A poster points to this comment at TechDirt in which a French journalist says the story is bogus. The law includes an exemption for "when the recording or the diffusion results from the normal exercise of a profession devoted to inform the public or is carried out in order to be used as proof in justice." It still looks like that would threaten unpaid, amateur journalists with criminal penalties. But one has to wonder if this whole story isn't the result of an advocacy group taking an extreme view of a harmless law, and a lot of people jumping in with knee-jerk outrage.