Voices

Full Tilt Rescue May Give Stake to Customers

A proposed rescue of Full Tilt Poker by a family-owned French investment company could involve offering equity stakes to some of the troubled website’s thousands of customers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Voices

France Télécom to Bid Adieu to Minitel

Next year, Minitel—France’s precursor to the Internet—will finally meet its maker. For 30 years the toaster-sized screen weathered the Internet revolution.

Voices

Selling Video Scoops Online

French website Citizenside recently sold a grainy video of British fashion designer John Galliano conducting an anti-Semitic rant to news organizations around the world. Mr. Galliano lost his job, and Citizenside pocketed a six-figure bounty.

Voices

Plastic Surgeon Figures in Google Face-Off in Spain

In 1991, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article centered on a dispute between Madrid plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti Russo and one of his patients over an allegedly botched breast surgery. The headline: “The Risk of Wanting to Be Slim.”

Voices

Hearst Bids for Lagardère Magazines

Hearst Corp. has agreed with Lagardère SCA to pay nearly $900 million for the French media conglomerate’s international magazine portfolio, betting that a bigger share of magazine readers is the antidote to an uncertain advertising forecast for print publications.

Voices

Discounted E-Books Spark Outcry from French Shops

For 30 years, Thierry Meaudre’s family bookshop has been protected from competition from big retailers, thanks to a law that bars heavy discounting on books. Now he is hoping the French government will protect him from a new threat: the electronic book.

Voices

Google Wins EU Ruling on Ad Keywords

The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday that Google Inc. has the right to sell ads linked to the Louis Vuitton name and other famous brands, a landmark judgment that clears search engines of trademark liability in Europe and protects a crucial revenue stream.

Voices

The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet Age

The word on the table that morning was “cloud computing.” To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with “informatique en nuage,” which literally means “computing in cloud.”