Instagram solves a French legal case: the rising prominence of data from social media as evidence

 

30 May 2019 (Paris, France) – Rock star Johnny Hallyday, who died in 2017, is easily (for most of you) the biggest artist you’ve never heard of – selling more than 110 million records over his six-decade career, per Nielsen Music which is the definitive source for this kind of information.

After two copies of Hallyday’s will were found, his grown children sought “to prove that their father lived mostly in France and not in the United States” to prevent his fourth wife from taking over as his sole heir. The two testaments were found in a safe deposit box. One of the documents, written in Los Angeles, appointed his wife, Laeticia, as sole heir and manager of his estate. That will entirely excluded Hallyday’s grown children from two previous relationships, David Hallyday and Laura Smet, something not permitted under French law. The two have been fighting to prove that their father lived mostly in France and not in the United States.

The battle over the Hallyday inheritance, including performers’ rights on over 1,000 songs and properties in France, on the French Island of St. Barthélémy in the Caribbean and in California, has mesmerized France. The estate is valued at tens of millions of euros. Hallyday was an idol for many during his life and he received a hero’s tribute in Paris after his death, as 15 million watched on television.

Johnny Hallyday’s widow, Laeticia, second from left, with their daughters Jade, left, and Joy, alongside Mr. Hallyday’s grown children Laura Smet and David Hallyday at his funeral in 2017.

 

And Instagram saved the day – helping to end one of France’s most public and bitter inheritance battles.

Laeticia Hallyday, the singer’s fourth wife, told a court near Paris that he had settled in Los Angeles in 2007, his daughters Jade and Joy went to school there, and he had received a green card in 2014. She also, according to court documents, cited the fascination for Elvis Presley and American culture that was at the center of most of Hallyday’s life and work.

David Hallyday, however, offered something even more compelling: a chart of Johnny and Laeticia Hallyday’s locations from 2012 to 2017. From 2012, his Instagram account shared a canny mixture of the personal and the professional, promoting his tours, his albums and his image as one of France’s most enduring stars.

So … he created a chart of all Johnny and Laeticia’s locations as revealed by pictures from their public Instagram accounts. The chart showed that Hallyday spent at least 151 days in France in 2015 and 168 the year after. He then spent eight months without interruption in the country, mainly because of his illness, before his death in 2017.

The court accepted the children’s argument, ruling that it had competence to decide on Mr. Hallyday’s estate.

Why it all matters: the decision serves as a reminder of the rising prominence of data from social media as evidence. Other than cases in which content is directly at fault, like bullying or harassment, social media posts have been used in divorce and criminal proceedings. In 2017, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued its first arrest warrant relying on videos posted on social media as evidence.

Obviously everyone is still finding their feet with this. There is a gradient of approaches out there. And as Joan Karazs, the New York Times Legal Editor, pointed out in a blog post, the attitude of today’s courts is similar to their predecessors in the early 20th century, when the admissibility of conversations on the telephone, then a relatively new technology, was still contested, according to a copy of the Harvard Law Review from 1918.

The problem with social media is that the technologies that we have to develop fakes are very sophisticated, making it very difficult to tell the difference between genuine material and fake material. So what we’re facing now is making sure that we’re not prejudicing the right to defense. The court in Paris said it handled the Instagram posts as public data in the same way it had other materials, such as press clippings. It was up to the widow, the court’s ruling said, to provide evidence to the contrary.

Oh, by the way: Laeticia Hallyday is appealing the ruling.

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