This time, it’s about user generated content!
Fuzz.fr, funded by Eric Dupin, a famous french power blogger, is about to be killed by the french legal system. Its owner has shut down the website, scared by a legal threat asking him for 40,000€ (approximately $60k) because of a rumor posted by one of Fuzz’s users (see his detailed explanations here - in french).
Law protecting ‘peoples’ in France are very though, and, just like Lespipoles.com, it might be the Achille’s heel of french startups : any user could kill your UGC service easily, beside, pre-publishing sreening is not only way too expensive, counter productive on a community point of view, but also stupid in regard of the french LCEN law, and pre-published screening is proving to be suicidal… French UGC is like being between a rock and a hard place.
Once again, England and Spain are the place to go…
So what’s next? Fuzz’s case could prove to be more fun than Lespipoles and Note2be, because the man behind Fuzz is nothing like the man behind Note2be. He’s a true internet addict, a respected blogger, and he did Fuzz because he belived in something (Fuzz started in 2005, it’s not a hit n’ run thing, nor a me-too). With more than 20,000 feed subscribers for his personal blog alone, Eric could make some real buzz about what’s going on, and maybe somebody is going to notice that the Internet is at risk in France… Maybe… Who knows…
Loic Lemeur flew away from the country one week after Nicolas Sarkozy’s election… Maybe he knew something we’re all starting to realize.
