back to article Sarkozy hails 'success' of Hadopi's pirate cops

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has hailed the success of the Hadopi copyright police. In a new report, Hadopi says its "soft stick" of a graduated response regime is working, and has released some statistics to support its claim. In an official statement, Sarkozy said the report "consolidates the undisputed pioneering role of …

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  1. Lee Dowling Silver badge

    "Hadopi's stats say that 6 per cent of internet subscribers have received a warning – and 95 per cent of those who received only one warning stopped infringing, and received no second warning. Of those receiving a second warning, 92 per cent stopped infringing. Ninety-eight per cent of those who received a third also stopped."

    Correction. Replaced stopped with "may have continued to do so using undetectable methods".

    1. Bakunin
      Holmes

      Selection Bias

      "Correction. Replaced stopped with "may have continued to do so using undetectable methods"."

      One of the biggest problems I see with their statistics is, there doesn't seem to be any way to appeal the decision until the third strike is implemented. This means we have no way of knowing is the complaint from a "copyright holder or representative" is in fact at all correct.

      Therefore plenty of people could have been misidentified the first or second time and not misidentified a third time. But they can't get that strike corrected.

      A lot of people that did nothing wrong have continued to do nothing wrong. The system must work!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The funniest part...

      ... is that the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro (which is usually well known for blindly parroting whatever Sarkozy and his league happen to say) made a paper proving that Hadopi's claimed success is bullshit, the P2P users having actually switched to streaming or direct download.

      http://www.lefigaro.fr/hightech/2012/03/27/01007-20120327ARTFIG00670-le-bilan-contrastee-de-l-action-de-l-hadopi.php [French]

      Now, if Le Figaro starts to show critical thinking, where's the world going to? That really scares me!

  2. Thomas 18
    Pirate

    it's too early to say how much enforcement is helping artists and investors in creativity.

    What does copyright enforcement have to do with artists?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: it's too early to say how much enforcement is helping artists and investors in creativity.

      Artists are the proletariat of the creative industries.

  3. ph0b0s

    Moved the problem on....

    "Hadopi's stats say that 6 per cent of internet subscribers have received a warning – and 95 per cent of those who received only one warning stopped infringing, and received no second warning. Of those receiving a second warning, 92 per cent stopped infringing. Ninety-eight per cent of those who received a third also stopped."

    Translation: People receiving a warning installed a software firewall to stop detection (being vague on purpose here as I don't want to suggest methods to stop detection via P2P, but there are ways) or moved to another sharing method. People receiving a second warning finally woke up and did the above. And so on with the higher warnings.

    I am very cynical about the claimed successes here. Due to the concentration on P2P, it can look like a success while everyone has moved to other methods or sharing / piracy. Has it stop some piracy, sure. As much as claimed, that is a lot less likely....

    The only positive evidence is an uptick in legal music buying, HIGHER than increases in countries that don't have this law.

  4. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Meh

    The man is desperately fighting for re-election. Is there ANY chance that he (or his minions) would make any other claim?

  5. Tom 35

    Even if people stopped downloading

    It's not helping anyone unless they start buying.

    It's not food, people don't have to have the stuff they download and my decide just to do without, or they may be downloading stuff they can't buy even if they want to (like stuff that's only available on iTunes.com).

    They might even be pissing off some people who were buying stuff before.

    I don't see any evidence that this is helping anyone (other then the people being paid to run the system).

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Even if people stopped downloading

      "It's not helping anyone unless they start buying"

      That is possibly the most succinct statement of the whole issue. While big media likes to portray 'piracy' as the cause of their financial downfall, its not the whole story and more laws to play whack-a-freetard are not really helping anyone.

      As the author (who is very much pro-copyright) has pointed out before: legitimate services have by-and-large sucked. If they make paying for stuff easy and don't piss paying folk off with DRM and "you are probably a thief" messages, maybe things will improve.

      But, and there is the rub, maybe the disposable money is never going to return to past levels enjoyed by the music/movie biz due to the range of other things Joe Public has to spend it on now (mobile phone contracts, fondle slabs, multi-player games, etrc)?

  6. Khaptain Silver badge

    Up for election

    As mentioned above, Sarko is running for president again and is currently in the "bring out anything that might possibly catch an elector or two" mode. He is desperately trying to prove that he actually managed to do something positive during the last five years and that is by no means an easy task.

    Hadopi like all the other legislations are basically futile in respect to the fact that they would have to monitor the internet to such an extent that it would no longer be financially viable.

    Has anyone ever seen a serious study that proves unequivicollay that stopping illegal downloading would actually increase "real" sales anyway ?

    If the governments or media moguls ever managed to control illegal activity on the web I am convinced that people would simply take up other hobbies. The web would lose a lot of its interest and would eventually be relegated to same level of couch potatoeness ™ as the television. Who would gain from this, no-one except for Google, Amazon and Facebook. Now that’s a sad thought.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Up for election

      « Has anyone ever seen a serious study that proves unequivicollay that stopping illegal downloading would actually increase "real" sales anyway ? »

      Actually, most studies I've seen tend to suggest that the biggest downloaders are among the biggest buyers, and that stopping illegal downloading (which I reckon is next to impossible) would only drive sales down since many people are using it to sample things and discover new ones before buying them.

      As long as the media companies keep their « one download = one lost sale » mentality, they're just shooting themselves in the foot.

  7. PyLETS
    Big Brother

    Even if this kind of intimidation works

    These kind of bullying tactics have to be reducing public support for ever longer copyright terms and ever more draconian enforcement, which ultimately requires elected politicians to continue to comply with the demands of their big media masters. When the interests of big media were the only message people ever heard about this big media got whatever they wanted. After PIPA/SOPA was defeated by a concerted online campaign when millions of people phoned representatives to complain, nothing in this space will ever be so certain again.

  8. IPatentedItSoIOwnIt
    Stop

    Soon this will be imposed on all of us

    Sorry to place a link to another site but haven't seen this report on El Reg yet.

    http://torrentfreak.com/acta-battle-nears-climax-in-europe-120328/

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