Fighting Internet Piracy: The French Experience With The Hadopi Law

Abstract

With the ever-increasing speed of the Internet and the ever-increasing power of personal computers and mobile devices, illegal downloading affects not only recorded music, but also movies and other medias. To stem the loss of revenues caused to copyright holders, France passed the Hadopi Law in September 2009 to be enforced by a new agency - the Hadopi Authority.

The Hadopi Authority’s mission includes three major objectives. 1) to enforce the copyright law on the Internet through legal actions against violators, 2) to educate Internet users about illegal versus legal activities with respect to the copyright law, and 3) to facilitate the development of Internet services providing legal access to copyrighted works.

To deter piracy and, at the same time, to serve as a pedagogical tool, Hadopi uses the “graduated response system”. Users who participate in illegal downloading are first warned two times. After a third violation, their file is forwarded to a court for possible prosecution. Between October 2010 and March 2012, the Hadopi Authority performed several surveys of Internet use to measure the effectiveness of the Law. The resulting reports show some modest positive changes in the behavior of French Internet users.