“Regulating film piracy without fines is like enforcing the highway code without speed cameras”

Tribune. Macron killed me! French cinema has no luck with Macron’s presidency… While all scientific studies prove the absence of risk of contamination in cinemas, they will remain closed until mid-June… at best!

Already, despite the opposition of almost the entire profession, his government has freed up the possibility of advertising for cinema on television, which will naturally further strengthen the American majors and the subsidiaries of television channels to the detriment of the independents.

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And, at the worst moment of the crisis which affects all the cinema, we learn that the law on piracy will be cut off from the only effective measure: the penal transaction, that is to say a simple fine. For nine years, no sanction against Internet users has been put in place to fight against the consumption of content illegally downloaded by more than 11.5 million French people, at a cost for the State and the profession of one billion dollars. ‘euros. Video and video-on-demand revenues have become paltry. However, they once represented up to 30% of our turnover. However, a French film distributor only has theaters and video to absorb increasingly high risks, since pre-sales on televisions are necessary to finance films.

Worry and despair

We will emerge extremely weakened from the Covid-19 crisis and it is with concern, not to say despair, that we learn that the Minister of Culture is opposed to the criminal transaction for pirate Internet users, not following in this feel the example of countries like Germany, which have been able to curb the phenomenon. How can we believe that we will be able to continue to finance the most ambitious French cinema with the only income from cinema receipts, which are always extremely uncertain?

Our catalogs are losing value every day: self-supplying pay TV channels to a level that totally excludes us, no possibility on TNT which is just a tap of uninteresting American action films, and well sure, lack of public service support!

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Our companies are however essential to the influence of French cinema and to the renewal of talents. To believe that we could regulate hacking without this transaction is to believe that we could enforce the highway code without radars, without tickets, without police or gendarmerie.

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