Mediation within the French Industrial Relations Context: The SFR Cegetel Case

This article examines the introduction of mediation in the French industrial relations context, as illustrated by the case of the SFR Cegetel collective agreement on social dialogue, which was signed in June 2002. This article provides an overview of relevant French legislation and explores why mediation is used so infrequently in France to settle labor conflicts, examines the growing interest in mediation in France as exemplified in the implementation of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs in several firms, and analyzes the barriers and incentives to mediation as well as the impact of internal mediation on the relations between management and employees.
We conclude that while inherited customs and lack of information curtail the use of mediation, disputants increasingly favor mediation as an option when they wish to gain time or when the situation is filled with especially acute open conflict. In addition, we conclude that the introduction of mediation favors a more participatory style of management, improves relationships between management and employees, and induces a better social dialogue within the firm.     

Consumer education: why the market doesn’t work

A growing literature studies the interactions between fully rational profit maximizing firms, on one side, and biased consumers, on the other side. Along these lines, this paper focuses on the consequences of quality misperception on the market equilibrium, by raising the following question: when quality bias affects consumer choice, do firms have incentives to educate their competitor’s customers in order to attract them? To tackle this issue, I incorporate consumer misperception in a Cournot-type duopoly model and consider the consequences on the market outcome. I focus on the two polar cases, when both firms either exploit consumer misperception, or educate completely their rival’s customers. I show that the market exerts conflicting forces on the firms’ incentives, such as a curse of debiasing might occur even in the presence of substitute goods. Consequently, the opportunity of a legal intervention to trigger consumer education is a key issue.     

From porn to cybersecurity passing by copyright: How mass surveillance technologies are gaining legitimacy … The case of deep packet inspection technologies

Recent coverage in the press regarding large-scale passive pervasive network monitoring by various state and government agencies has increased interest in both the legal and technical issues surrounding such operations. The monitoring may take the form of which systems (and thus potentially which people) are communicating with which other systems, commonly referred to as the metadata for a communication, or it may go further and look into the content of the traffic being exchanged over the network. In particular the monitoring may rely upon the implementation of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies. These technologies are able to make anything that happens on a network visible and recordable. While in practice the sheer volume of traffic passing through a DPI system may make it impractical to record all network data, if the system systematically records certain types of traffic, or looks for specific patterns in all traffic, the privacy concerns are highly significant. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to show that despite the increasing public awareness in relation to the capabilities of Internet service providers (ISPs), a cross-field and comparative examination shows that DPI technologies are in fact progressively gaining legal legitimacy; second to stress the need to rethink the relationship between data protection law and the right to private life, as enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention on human rights and Article 7 of the European Charter of fundamental rights, in order to adequately confine DPI practices. As a result, it will also appear that the principle of technical neutrality underlying ISP's liability exemptions is misleading.     

Beyond trips: Why the wto‘s Doha Round is unhealthy

The current round of World Trade Organization (wto) negotiations—the Doha Round—has significant implications for global health which have received insufficient attention from the global health community. All too often the health implications of global trade agreements are examined only after their conclusion, and are concerned only with intellectual property rights. This paper seeks to move beyond this narrow focus and elucidate the wider health implications of the Doha Round. It explores the negative effect of the Round on state capacity to provide and regulate health services in low-income countries, and the impact it will have on livelihoods among the poor and their ability to access health services. Overall the paper makes the case for greater engagement from the health community with the wto and the Doha Round negotiations beyond the customary focus on intellectual property rights.     

A Rare Case of Poisoning with a Volatile Substance: Quantitative Determination of n‐Butane in Postmortem Tissue

Poisoning with volatile substances remains exceptional. Authors report the case of a married couple who were found in a car with a butane gas bottle: the woman was dead and her husband alleged it was an unsuccessful suicide pact. A specific research of volatile substances on postmortem samples with headspace gas chromatography–mass spectrometry following a quantitative determination was performed. The n‐butane concentrations detected were composed of 610 μg/L (cardiac blood), 50 μg/kg (brain), 134 μg/kg (lungs), 285 μg/kg (liver), and 4090 μg/kg (heart) and were compatible with the rare lethal concentrations evoked in the literature. The cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation through n‐butane criminal poisoning. Authors recommendation therefore is to take samples immediately and place them in properly sealed containers and hence analyzing the samples as soon as possible after collecting them or storing them under ?30°C (?22°F) if analyses cannot be performed immediately.     

LIFE BEYOND LIFE – An Easy Way to Derive Lung Fibroblasts from Cadavers

Several protocols have illustrated the possibility of deriving cells, such as fibroblasts, from different organs. These techniques generally concern organs sampled from living persons, but have already been described for cadavers, especially concerning the skin and tendons. We present, for the first time, an easy way to derive pulmonary fibroblasts from a lung tissue sampled from a cadaver and directly culture plated. The fibroblast output was checked daily. We obtained lung fibroblasts from 3 (60%) cadavers and 2 (100%) living persons. The fibroblast output took about 3 days for cells from living persons and took up to 39 days for those from cadavers. We did not clearly identify any parameters that could explain these differences. Nevertheless, these derived cells had the same features as the source cells, especially in terms of morphology and proliferation, and could potentially be used in different research domains such as forensic or regeneration medicine.     

An academic perspective on the copyright reform

The recently proposed new Copyright Directive was released on 14 September 2016. It has been described by EU law-makers as the pillar of the copyright package promised by the European Commission (EC), to be delivered before the end of Mr. Juncker's mandate. In its Communication of 6 May 2015, the EC had stressed “the importance to enhance cross-border access to copyright-protected content services, facilitate new uses in the fields of research and education, and clarify the role of online services in the distribution of works and other subject-matter.” The proposed Copyright Directive is thus a key measure aiming to address two of these three issues. However it is not without shortfalls.We have therefore decided to publicly express our concerns and send an open letter to the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council to urge them to re-assess the new provisions dealing with mandatory filtering of user-generated content in the light of the CJEU case law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.In a more extended statement, we examine in details the text of both the explanatory memorandum and the Directive itself.Our conclusions are:1. A comprehensive re-assessment of Article 13 and Recital 39 in the light of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the E-commerce Directive (in particular Article 15) including CJEU case law is needed, as the proposed Copyright Directive does not expressly address the issue of its compatibility with both of these texts.2. Recital 38 does not clarify the domain and effect of Article 13. Rather, it creates confusion as it goes against settled CJEU case law (relating to Articles 14 and 15 of the E-commerce Directive and Article 3 of the Infosoc Directive). Recital 38 should therefore be deleted or substantially re-drafted/re-phrased. If the EU wants to introduce a change in this regard it should clearly justify its choice. In any case, a recital in the preamble to a directive is not an appropriate tool to achieve this effect.We hope that this exercise will prove useful for the debate that has now begun both in the European Parliament and in the Council.