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A few years ago, France passed a Law to protect small companies such as Nexedi against large companies that try to impose unbalanced contracts. [...] Not allowi
by pflats 10y ago
A few years ago, France passed a Law to protect small companies such as Nexedi against large companies that try to impose unbalanced contracts. [...] Not allowing the publication in Apple's AppStore of web browsers that are not based on Apple's own Webkit raises in our opinion the same issues as if Carrefour (a company similar to Walmart) was not selling any beans but those based on Carrefour's seeds. This may be legal in other countries but in France, it is most likely not.
This is incredibly weird to me. In France, you can sue to force a major company to sell your product if you don't like their terms? Is this just speculation, or is there actual case law? How is this even tenable?
And it only applies to contracts the aggrieved smaller party views as unbalanced. So you can sue if you don't like the contract offered, but you can't sue if you would accept the terms of their contract but MegaCorp just chooses not to do business with you?
If that's actually the case, I wouldn't be surprised if Carrefour changes their policy from "we only sell Carrefour beans and beans grown from Carrefour seeds" to "we only sell Carrefour beans".
- fermigier 10y agoSome legal comments on the law (in French): http://www.efl.fr/actualites/affaires/contrats-regles-communes/details.html?ref=ui-c2d9a280-5e3b-44e8-8e52-d37d160408f1 http://www.efl.fr/actualites/affaires/contrats-regles-commun... Basically, if there was a clause in the Apple Store contract that said "to publish your software on our platform, you must give us three fingers of your right hand and your first born son", a judge could declare it void.
- lucaspiller 10y agoI feel that it's fair (at least the bean argument): Say I ran a couple of farms which grew beans and employed 250 people to work on my farms. What would happen if my main customer Carrefour, one of the biggest supermarkets in France, decided to stop selling my beans and sold only theirs (grown and packed in a foreign country)? I could try and sell to local shops, but it's unlikely they would buy the same volume as Carrefour. Or I could try and sell to another big supermarket, but they probably already have enough beans from other suppliers. I'd probably have to let go of a lot of people, or even shut down the business, which would mean a lot of people would be out of work, and most likely relying on the welfare system to support them. So in return for a megacorp boosting their profits slightly, the country has to pay a lot in return to support unemployed people. (How it applies in this case to Apple I'm not really sure though :P)
- briandear 10y agoThat would be your fault for basing your business on the support from another. Carrafour has no obligation to you. You're the one that built a business ignoring the real distribution risk of relying upon one company. That's on you.
- Millennium 10y ago>Is this just speculation, or is there actual case law? France is a civil-law system, so case law is in theory irrelevant. In practice it isn't so irrelevant these days, but it still doesn't carry nearly the same weight that it does in common-law systems (like most of the US, though not Louisiana). On the one hand, this makes it much easier to ignore previous rulings by clearly corrupt judges. On the other hand, it makes consistent interpretation of the law much harder to achieve. It's a tradeoff. In other words, Nexedi knows that case law is against them in the US, so they cherry-picked a location for the lawsuit that would allow them to circumvent this obstacle.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoFrance is their HQ (Lille), so I'm not sure it's fair to accuse them of cherry-picking. (Not that I agree with the suit.)