French court denies Apple injunction against tax protests

A Parisian court has blocked Apple's attempt to prevent Attac — the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen's Action — from staging protests at the company's French retail stores.

As part of a recent lawsuit, Apple had been seeking a three-year ban under the threat of a 150,000-euro fine, MacGeneration said on Friday. The company was also pursuing 3,000 euros in damages following a wave of protests in December.

The court found however that Apple couldn't identify any immediate damages, and ordered Apple to pay Attac 2,000 euros in legal fees.

In a statement, Attac argued that simply entering places like Apple Opera "without violence, without degradation, and without blocking the access of the store to shoppers" didn't cause any damages, and was not a valid reason for limiting Attac's freedoms.

In fact images and video from the Opera protest showed no permanent impact. The closest thing to violence was when Attac originally entered the store, since some shoving took place.

Apple is known to use elaborate loopholes to pay minimal taxes on its overseas revenue. In August 2016, though, the European Commission ordered Ireland to collect billions in back taxes, charging that it had extended preferential tax arrangements — something illegal under E.U. law. The Irish government has been slow to collect the money, prompting the Commission to take it to court.

42 Comments

DAalseth 3035 comments · 6 Years

About 6 years ago

I don’t know French law. In the US a store is private property and the owner can restrict protests on their own property. Is this not true in Francs?

bshank 257 comments · 7 Years

So in France “some shoving” is no biggie, huh? Good to know

DAalseth said:

I don’t know French law. In the US a store is private property and the owner can restrict protests on their own property. Is this not true in Francs?

In the EU if a private company or their private property or website is a place people like a lot, apparently it is magically deemed a public service (like when the EU tried to claim Google cannot charge for ad placements on their website since it is “unfair” against those companies who don’t pay for ads)... and if they don’t like it they can apparently intrude and assault people who choose to try to have a peaceful shopping experience

jungmark 6927 comments · 13 Years

Ridiculous. No loitering. Are these anarchists just standing there doing nothing?

Oh BTW, "Apple is known to use elaborate loopholes" is called following the tax laws. It's not Apple's fault the loopholes exist.

jungmark said:

Ridiculous. No loitering. Are these anarchists just standing there doing nothing?

Oh BTW, "Apple is known to use elaborate loopholes" is called following the tax laws. It's not Apple's fault the loopholes exist.

It almost feels like some sort of candid camera prank where the social experimenter says here is a $100 bill anybody can take for free. Those who decided to take the cash are berated as a-holes by the clueless people who either didn’t know this social experiment was even happening or ignored it and walked by and now they are upset after finding out how dense they were.