

French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales - jghefner
http://torrentfreak.com/french-three-strikes-law-slashes-piracy-but-fails-to-boost-sales-120330/

======
alan_cx
Well, its all based on the idea that people who "illegally" download would
have bought the item otherwise. Really not true. Mostly the reason is either
convenience or lack of cash to buy in the first place.

I think of all the CD's I bought in the past which turned out to be garbage
apart from the two singles released which are the reason for buying the CD. I
think of all the DVD's I bought that I watched once. Now I don't have to waste
my money. I can down load for free and buy a decent packaged copy if I deem it
worthy of my money.

Thing is, I've been stitched up for years by these gits with terrible product,
and I was getting back my wasted money. Now I purchase wisely because I can
try it out first. I only buy what I personally feel is good product. I delete
the garbage.

I suppose the media companies will require lots of their customers to be sued
and jailed before any one in politics stands up to them and says, " no, you
are wrong. You sales are down because your product is mostly rubbish, and sold
in an inconvenient way. People are valuing your product as zero. Where they
don't, they buy. "

What the media companies are concerned about is that they are losing the
ability to con us with rubbish. What I think is good, is that the sales they
now do have are probably better quality sales, and the people who did buy are
happier with what they bought.

Said it before, but all that is happening here is that governments are for
some reason trying to prop up failing business models. I dont understand why.
If it were that the pace of technology threatened a clockwork clock company,
then that company would be expected to either move on or go out of business.
Some how, no so with the media companies. I assume that its to do with money,
political funding and the usual democratic corruption.

Pah, could be wrong, but that's my current thinking.

~~~
J3L2404
>People are valuing your product as zero. Where they don't, they buy.

No. The popular content is downloaded more. You can jump thru hoops and do
backflips but the fact is people don't want to pay. Period. Everything else is
justification.

~~~
zanny
Of course they don't want to buy, they recognize the cost of reproduction is
zero. It is hard fact that once someone sets all the trillions of bits in a
movie, game, operating system, or anything else we do, just ONCE, you can
clone it for nothing as many times as you want.

Until we get off the distribution per unit model of retail we will have this
war against consumers.

~~~
J3L2404
>they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero.

That is being very generous to the pimply-faced downloaders. I am quite sure
the costs upfront or otherwise have no bearing.

~~~
J3L2404
Sorry to anyone offended by _pimply_ , but this idea that anything copyable
deserves no copyright is childish. Exceedingly so on a site about software.

~~~
barrkel
Copyright is a red herring. What we want is to encourage creation of valuable
information products and services. Historically, copyright was one way of
doing that, because copying information directly was difficult and required
apparatus and physical tokens that could be policed relatively easily. When
copying becomes as simple and trivial as breathing, policing the act of
copying becomes intrusive and laborious.

So different mechanisms of encouraging content creation need to be found; the
fight we should be fighting has little to do with preserving copyright in its
historical form.

~~~
J3L2404
Whether you like or not copyright law still exists. It has been dismissed on
message boards but has not been repealed.

When there is a viable mechanism of content creation it will gradually take
over, just like every industry.

You can't tell people to give up their horse and buggy if the cars aren't
ready yet.

~~~
zanny
All of the major historical changes of worth in terms of law and procedure all
arose from doing things that were socially judged wrong but in hindsight we
see they were right.

I feel copyright is one of those. I want to see the individuals that make the
creative digital goods I consume well compensated and happy, because they make
amazing things. But simultaneously, I realize my duplication of that good
costs no one anything except potential lost sales and fractions of a cent of
electricity.

------
citricsquid
This article is ridiculous. It has cherry picked statistics and misrepresented
them. In 2011 digital downloads of music (through legitimate services, eg:
itunes, spotify) GREW almost 20%(!!!).

The reason that the overall statistics show a drop is because of physical
media being included and that has fallen a huge amount:

> Internet music growth was insufficient to offset falling sales of music on
> physical supports, down 11.5 percent to EUR 412 million, with the overall
> recorded music market falling by 3.9 percent in 2011.

If you ONLY consider the digital side:

> Download revenues grew by 18.4 percent compared to 2010. Streaming and
> subscriptions grew by 73 percent to EUR 39 million. Subscriptions services
> such as those from Spotify and Deezer grew by 89 percent to EUR 26 million.

[http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-
worth-e...](http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-
eur-110-mln-in-2011-study)

So when the author says:

> So if piracy is down massively in France, one would expect that the revenues
> are soaring, right?

He is being deceitful. Revenues are soaring..., they're up almost 20% on 2010.
If the aim of the three strike rule was to stop digital piracy and increase
digital sales that is exactly what it has achieved, they've dropped piracy 50%
and increased sales 20%. You can't include the physical media sales in the
latter to make a point...

~~~
i_cannot_hack
Yes, the digital sales "GREW almost 20%(!!!)", as you enthusiastically put it.
But you behave as if this is somehow extraordinary, and on top of it all
automatically[0] assume that this is due to the reduction in piracy.

In UK digital sales grew by 27% in 2011 alone, and they have no similar
laws.[1]

The truth is that the digital sales are increasing drastically all over the
world, not just in France. This does not have anything to do with any
reduction in piracy, but is due to a wider selection of products and more
accessible market.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc> [1]
[http://www.bpi.co.uk/assets/files/music%20sales%20slip%20in%...](http://www.bpi.co.uk/assets/files/music%20sales%20slip%20in%202011%20but%20digital%20grow%20strongly.pdf)

~~~
Silhouette
_In UK digital sales grew by 27% in 2011 alone, and they have no similar
laws._

Actually, we do, primarily under the controversial Digital Economy Act that
was pushed through just before the last general election.

The laws aren't widely applied yet in the way that they apparently have been
in France, but there has been some fairly high profile threatening going on
all the same.

In other words, while I'm certainly not equating the situation in the two
countries and the seriousness or otherwise of the threat to pirates right now,
it's probably not fair to totally discount the effect of anti-piracy rules in
the UK either.

~~~
i_cannot_hack
As you say, the laws aren't widely applied yet, and I hardly think britain has
had a 50% cut in piracy.

Buy hey, let's take my country (Sweden) as an example then. Digital sales went
up a whopping 65% in 2011[0], and I can promise you that although we've have
had some digital rights laws (like IPRED) no pirates here are actually afraid
of getting caught, and the Pirate Party are still going strong. Actually, the
only country with a sizable reduction in piracy (France) seem to be the one
with the least increase in digital sales.

My guess is that the large increase in digital sales in Sweden is mainly due
to the popularity of Spotify.

[0] [http://www.ifpi.se/wp/wp-
content/uploads/GLF-f%C3%B6rs%C3%A4...](http://www.ifpi.se/wp/wp-
content/uploads/GLF-f%C3%B6rs%C3%A4ljningsstatistik-GLF-hel%C3%A5ret-2011.pdf)
(in swedish)

------
truxs
The biggest problem in France is the lake of legal offers for anything but
music, and this won't change soon for several reasons:

-2€ for an episode of house, SD, for 48 hours, up to 5€ for a movie for 48 hours but still they are complaining about the situation and would like to change the prices up to 8€/SDmovie for 48h [http://www.journaldugeek.com/2012/03/28/vod-des-fims-plus-ch...](http://www.journaldugeek.com/2012/03/28/vod-des-fims-plus-chers-en-france-voulus-par-les-syndicats/)

-Legally you need to wait 3 years after the theater release to put a movie on vod. Why it won't change ? Because canal+ a private channel who broadcast movies only 10 month after their release is also the main financial contributor of french productions. [http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22024-l-effort-minimal-de-c...](http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22024-l-effort-minimal-de-canal-pour-reviser-la-chronologie-des-medias.html)

------
guard-of-terra
How does it work? I mean, every single torrent connection is encrypted today.
How would they know that I'm seeding something copyrighted, not a windows swap
file?

~~~
Zirro
They simply check which IPs are in a certain swarm, for a certain file. This
is then reported to issue a strike against the connected IPs.

~~~
guard-of-terra
So they seed files themselves and if you're unlucky enough to download from
their seed you're busted?

This would probably mean you're reasonably safe if you're downloading niche
stuff; private trackers would also help?

~~~
Zirro
I would assume it's enough for them to join a swarm to locate other peers.
There are probably automated tools which can do this very quickly, just like I
can see the IPs of fellow peers, both seeders and leechers in my
torrentclient.

Both of your statements are true, though.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Oww. I didn't think of that.

~~~
drostie
You can see a prototype of an open system for this sort of thing here:
<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/> . (Actually, that site is pretty
interesting to visit if you're on a friend's WiFi or at an airport or internet
cafe -- I just found out that, from this WiFi point, someone downloaded The
Lion King in December 2011.)

But yeah. Pretty much any tracker is constantly disclosing peers; that's how
BitTorrent works. It is considered important for a tracker to introduce fake
IP addresses into these lists, so that simply being on the list is not enough
to prove that someone was actually downloading a given bit of content, and
there have now been research groups which have gotten takedown notices
delivered to printers and so forth, so that if you're not confirmed to be
seeding content it's hard to confirm that you're breaking the law.

It is also considered best practice with BitTorrent to use an IP blocklist
with your client, but those are probably not too hard for a dedicated attacker
to get around -- if you share illegal material and use an IP blocklist, you
are basically saying "I will hope that you pick the low-lying fruit first,
before you pick me."

~~~
Zirro
The best thing to do today if you want to be on the safe side is to use a VPN-
service which doesn't keep logs. It's likely only a question of time before
the anti-piracy organizations start going after them instead, though.
Blocklists are, as you state, not very effective and often tend to contain
false positives which gives you fewer peers.

------
sek
The reason why the Entertainment industry loses so much was never just piracy,
the majority are the alternatives that are available on the internet. All this
time people spend on Soundcloud and Facebook has to come somewhere. A YouTube
catvideo replaces time people can spend on TV or hearing their favorite
artist.

They all have a MBA who are in charge these entertainment companies, they
should have heard of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis> Substitute goods
everywhere and you gonna have a difficult time, but blaming someone else is
probably just easier.

------
cabalamat
Good. I hope the copyright industry doesn't gain a single penny because of
Hadopi.

------
waterlesscloud
Of course, the point of laws and law enforcement is to cut crime, which this
did.

~~~
tsotha
No, the point of laws is not to cut crime. The point of a law is reduce
socially damaging behavior.

What is the point of this law?

~~~
waterlesscloud
To reduce socially damaging behavior.

It is anti-social to attempt to benefit from the work of others without
compensating them.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Since when it is so?

I'm benefiting from the existence of the alphabet, Linux operating system or
declaration of human rights without compensating their creators.

The best things, ones you really need, come for free.

The best things could not exist if they weren't, and we'd still be in the
stone age with your mindset.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Linux wouldn't exist without a lot of compensated work that came before it.

But seriously, these are different categories of things we're discussing here,
and that has to be be abundantly clear to everyone.

~~~
guard-of-terra
But still it isn't. A lot of entities benefiting from things in public domain
but refusing to let their derivative works go, forever. They want to both use
what the previous generations done and tax the future generations out their
nose.

That's the true source of the problem, and the true source of copyright
crimes: entities thinking they are entitled to many things for free, but still
that everybody have to pay. There's no place for compromise.

If something is anti-social, that's what.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I'm not following your argument. Because the alphabet is free, Harry Potter
should be free?

And I'm having a hard time seeing 15 dollar books and movies and 99 cent songs
as "taxing through the nose".

~~~
guard-of-terra
For example, I believe that every song recorded before 1997 should be
available for purchase in any music web store (some regulated part of the
revenue should still go to the musicians if they can be located, which is what
recording industry association can do) And all of those songs should be free
to derive and cover (some small regulated part of the revenue on derived song
should go to musicians via the same mechanism).

Or else old people would tend to become unavailable at all because you can't
locate original authors. And music becoming available is very bad. Much worse
than "scary criminal pirate" bad.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I'm very much in favor of shorter copyright terms. 15 years is probably too
short, but closing in on 100 is clearly too long.

However, we all know that that vast, vast majority of piracy is of newer works
and isn't at all related to the fact that copyright lasts too long.

~~~
guard-of-terra
But it is related to a fact that copyright holders prevent people from
convenient access to content in order to squeeze more short-term profits.

For example, tomorrow I'm going to pirate Game Of Thrones S02E01 because there
is no way to obtain it where I live: legally, in English, with subtitles,
tomorrow. Mind you, many people would still pirate it anyway, but I'm ready to
pay, let's say, 5$ if it was possible. And I might even reconsider my position
on piracy. It's not so I'm going to pirate it and I feel no guilt because
they've violated the contract: they provide content, I pay money.

The only way to fix the situation is legally force them to deliver. This way
they lose some short term money, but they gain loyalty, crush piracy and win
in the long term.

Same with music. Streaming services already eat at piracy; but not every
musician is available on those. Same with books.

