Claude Gubler’s ‘Le Grand Secret’: Routing around censorship in 1996

By Chris Meadows

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore

This saying has long been true in the Internet world, but it was a shock to many when it first came true in the real world.

Banned in France

I was recently reading through my copy of Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser by Rick Broadhead, a collection of anecdotes about great technological blunders, and one that caught my eye was this story from 1996.

There had been a great deal of controversy surrounding the late French President François Mitterrand’s health during his final years in office. After his death, his physician published a tell-all book, Le Grand Secret (in English, The Big Secret) claiming that Mitterrand had secretly suffered greatly from cancer all through his term of office.

After the first printing of 40,000 copies sold out in a single day, Mitterrand’s family convinced the French court to ban further sales of the book on the grounds that it violated doctor-patient confidentiality.

(Gubler would later receive a four-month suspended prison sentence and apparently lose his medical license (the translation of the French Wikipedia page is hard to understand) for breach of secrecy, and be ordered (along with the publisher) to pay 340,000 francs restitution to Mitterrand’s family.)

The book would remain banned in France until 2004, when the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for not lifting the ban after a few months in the name of freedom of expression. It was republished by a French publisher in 2005.

Routing Around the Damage

But back in 1996, an Internet café owner named Pascal Barbraud decided to scan and post the entire book on the fledgling World Wide Web. And so he did, in the form of huge page scans that were somewhat unwieldy to read and download. The media attention this brought to him soon led to his arrest on unrelated child-support charges. However, the seed had been planted.

Others (including Internet gadfly Declan McCullagh) were soon able to download those pages, convert them to ASCII text, and repost them in easier-to-download form. Volunteers began to translate the work into English. By April, 1996 the translation was complete, and it still exists on the Internet to this day.

The Internet interpreted France’s censorship as damage, and routed around it.

Early Piracy Concerns

“My first reaction when it happened was well-done, well-played," said Olivier Orban, the director of Plon Publishing, which sold 40,000 copies of [Le Grand Secret] in the week before it was banned in January. "But then I realized the danger on the Internet for all books in the future. We can’t protect the author and the copyright. I think we have no means to fight against it."

So reported the New York Times in March, 1996. The article is an interesting look back at the period in Internet history right before the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Indeed, it is possible that what happened to Gubler’s book contributed to Congress’s willingness to impose such legislation.

Ironically, the most well-known provision of the DMCA would not have applied in this case, since no encryption was broken to put Dr. Gubler’s book on the Internet.

The DMCA did also give copyright owners broader powers to have copyrighted material taken down—though these would not have applied either, since the publisher decided not to take action against the spread of their banned book. "In a normal circumstance it is a theft," Mr. Orban said, "but in these circumstances we couldn’t have the same judgment." And Dr. Gubler was reportedly “pleased that the information has gotten out—in whatever form.”

Piracy Here and Now

Thirteen years later in 2009, when it is possible to download files that contain hundreds of illicit e-books bundled together with just a few moments’ searching—not to mention limitless music, audiobooks, TV shows, movies, and games—that article’s concerns over a few illicit e-copies of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy seem almost quaint. Media piracy on the Internet has evolved far beyond what those publishers even feared was possible, and the DMCA has not done much to stem the tide.

Whether piracy is truly harmful to the producers of pirated media has been debated ever since it began, and will continue to be debated long into the future. Does it steal money from the creators, or does it act as free advertising in exchange for money the creators would never have received anyway? Pundits are sharply divided.

Even so, it is interesting to look back at one of the first high-profile cases that showed how powerful the Internet could be at disseminating a text that a government didn’t want people to read. This early demonstration of the power of the Internet would by no means be the last.