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France Claimed It Killed Film Piracy

posted 02 Jun 2012, 00:20

President of French movie and production company Gaumont made a statement saying that within 7 months of 2011, no French movie was downloaded on the Internet, due to French anti-piracy legislation known as Hadopi.

Gaumont recently released financial report, where its president Nicolas Seydoux (also known as a head of ALPA, the outfit fighting audiovisual piracy) appreciated Hadopi and other entities for successfully killing all digital piracy late last year. This opinion was also shared by the former French president in 2012.

Nevertheless, such statement can’t of course be entirely true, and a number of industry observers, including the French website Numerama, pointed at that. The service said that they could hardly believe that there wasn’t a single incident involving the pirating of the local movies. They also mention another report revealing 110,000,000 audiovisual piracy incidents.

According to ALPA and Gaumont’s claims, unauthorized downloads of films decreased twice in 2011. Moreover, Seydoux claimed that a harder nut to crack was the film streaming services. Meanwhile, he praised the delisting of a number of infringing websites, 3 of which ended up with the arrest and imprisonment of their operators.

Finally, the production company may have political purposes, because the country’s new president François Hollande supported anti-piracy law, though prior to elections he was against it. Still, 2010’s surveys suggested that piracy in the country has in fact increased after Hadopi passed.

In 2 years, unauthorized file-sharing dropped, while so did music sales. This happened despite the tight monitoring of P2P networks – this fact can also say a lot about the officials’ claims.

Source: ET