“The police talk to you every day on BFMTV”: sentenced in summary proceedings in June 2019 for two public posters bearing this slogan, Michel-Ange Flori, a Var poster accustomed to blows and the courts, was cleared during the trial on the merits, even obtaining condemnation from the news channel.
In its judgment on Thursday, the Marseilles court dismissed BFMTV of all of its claims and ordered the channel to pay the costs as well as the payment of 10,000 euros to Michel-Ange Flori for its procedural costs. He accompanied his decision with a provisional execution, “given the seniority of the case”.
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Operating until 2016 400 billboards in the Var, Michel-Ange Flori had kept two of these billboards, in the towns of Toulon and La-Seyne-sur-Mer, which he had used since 1999 for his personal communication, with parodic messages and posters.
In May 2019, this fervent supporter of the “yellow vests” had thus published a drawing of May 68 of an armed CRS at the microphone of the ORTF, accompanied by this message “The police speak to you every day on BFMTV”. Claiming an infringement of its trademark, the channel had been reinforced by the interim order of the Marseilles court, on June 5, 2019, which had ordered the display to pay it 30,000 euros as a provision for the damage suffered. .
Judging there on the merits, the Marseilles court made another analysis, considering that BFMTV “is acting on the basis of the infringement of its trademark” and that the defendant must have obtained “an economic advantage” for the infringement be constituted. “Michelangelo Flori acted for the purpose of information, even if it was polemical”, considers the judgment:
In December, the 64-year-old poster was also cleared by the Court of Cassation for two posters which caricatured Emmanuel Macron as Hitler or Pétain. The court found that he had “not exceeded the permissible limits of freedom of expression”. At first instance and on appeal, he had been convicted of “public insults” to the President of the Republic.