“Strange time when pirating films or series is still assimilated to a ‘cool’ gesture”

Chronic. Cinemas have been closed or weakened for a year and, meanwhile, film piracy is rampant. Thank you, Covid-19… When you can’t find what you want outside, you steal it at home. And then we also steal what we can find by paying. So much so that the audiovisual world once again denounces a “Scourge”, about which we spoke less, and which leads him a little more.

The Hadopi, a public body responsible for combating piracy, makes a sad observation. A small quarter of the 53 million Internet users “steal” every month football matches, music, films or TV series. Above all, while the number of pirates was on the decline – they were 16 million in 2015, 12 million in 2019, 8 million in early 2020 – it rose to more than 14 million during the containment in March. Films and series are the main victims of fraud, as is football.

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With closed rooms and dashing piracy, the cinema suffers a double penalty. Apart from luxury, which is undermined by counterfeiting while doing not too badly, no other sector has a turnover stolen at 25%.

The shortfall is estimated at 1 billion euros per year, not to mention the hundreds of millions of tax losses for the State and the destruction of jobs. Producer and distributor Jean Labadie gives this example: sales of French films on DVD or VoD (video on demand) represented 25% of his income. “Because of the hacking, it fell to 2% or 3%. “

Extremely rare fines

The Hadopi says, however, that in ten years two-thirds of hackers who exchanged illicit files have returned to the right path after receiving one or two warnings.

But many in the cinema see in this organism a gendarme who scares not many people. First, because fines, which can only be issued by the courts, are extremely rare. And then the Hadopi only tracks a mode of pirating, called “peer to peer” (P2P), or 2.5 million people, but not those who have been gaining momentum for years, such as streaming or direct downloading. , which have become the majority.

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For these hacks, it is no longer a question of targeting “thieves” but the mafia sites which drink them. This is the role of the Association for the Fight against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA), which has achieved great success by having 380 sites and 1,700 domain names banned by the courts. Except that here again the confinements stopped this momentum.

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