Hadopi Anti-Piracy Law Was A Success, Says President Sarkozy

April 1, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues 

According to France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy the Hadopi graduate response system paid off as illegal file-sharing is visibly going down. To support his claim, the president released some statistics.

In his official statement, Sarkozy acknowledged that the report “consolidates the undisputed pioneering role of France in the cultural industries’ adaptation to the digital age.”

The report shows that ever since Hadopi was passed into law in 2010 95% of those who received the first letter (part of the three-strikes system) have stopped from illegally downloading copyrighted material. The study covers a period of one year, from October 2010 to December 2011. Also, “92% of those having received a second notice are in the same situation (no further illegal behavior recorded within the timeframe set out by law) and 98% of those having received a third notice show the same trend,” writes the report. Also going down is the usage of peer-to-peer, but that started before Hadopi and continued until September 2011.

Several other reports show the same thing; for example, Nielsen records a 17% drop in audience levels, while NetRatings’ opinion is that it went down with 29%. Peer Media Technologies says that illegal file-sharing has dropped by 43%, and ALPA agrees that the decline is of 66%.

While these numbers are still questionable and may not reveal if this is an actual change of behaviour or people just turned to other methods of downloading, Hadopi’s report insists believing in the first option.

“Since the graduated response was first launched in France, many sources concur that P2P use in France steadily declined throughout 2011,” reads the Hadopi report.
As for the impact of Megaupload’s shut down had on France’s file-sharing community, the report stated:

“AS yet there is not enough perspective and data to assert specific changes in internet users’ practices and consumption patterns resulting from this.”

“Nonetheless, it is not to be precluded that some who previously downloaded illegally via P2P will change behaviours following the closure. As the graduated response new information system goes into production, from October 1 2012, it will become possible to adjust the system to the new environment, should it come to be confirmed.”

What many governments fail to understand is that neither Bittorrent nor other cyber locker services have the purpose to infringe content; their solely goal is facilitate and make it easier for people to share between each other on a free from censorship network that we call the Internet.. For example, when using uTorrent or any other Bittorrent client your IP address is right there, an easy target for rights holders and copyright activists. And since copyright laws have become more and more aggressive and, most of all, confusing (terms such as “rogue sites” and copyright infringement serve only for the movie and music industry, instead of the people and creators), it’s only natural that users start to hide their identities behind proxies, VPNs and so on. It’s a bit hard (the least to say) to think that you could go to prison for 2 songs that you’ve downloaded (most of the times to see if you like the album and BUY it) and accept that as the “natural course” of it – and no one should accommodate with that thought because, and it’s not only us who say it, the three-strikes system is a rude violation of our rights.

However, going back to what Nicolas Sarkozy had to say about Hadopi, he concluded:

“Thanks to the success of the ‘graduated response’, which was widely copied abroad, France has very strong credibility with its European partners in meeting the challenges facing the cultural industries.”

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