It is clear that you are not going to answer any substantive point I make:

- Why would this effect happen in France and never be seen before, or since in any other context?

- If you look at the “analysis” of the iPhone data, the author states quite specifically he does not know the sales data to make the correlation and therefore dismisses it. In a statistical only analysis, this is pretty well fatal. Now, he also has no idea how iTunes sales map to iOS sales, and so on.

- You yourself noted that there was NO OBSERVED IMPACT of the law going live or the strikes letters going out. None. HADOPI DOES NOT WORK.You ignored this too.

- Yes, this paper, and the megaupload one that showed two studios getting more sales after the shutdown (why study only 2? Oh, I know, they already knew that gave the answer they wanted) were commisioned by the media industries. I’m not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, but…

- And of course you would like to ignore the legal difficulties inherent in the system. Convicting innocents on appalling data with an assumption that they are guilty is just wrong. Even if it worked, the ends wouldn’t justify the means.

So as you like to ignore any valid point I make, I’m not going to waste any more time on you.

I’m not really arguing with the three points you made in your recent post.

But your claim “any research on this issue is inconclusive” is just you spouting your point again in the face of evidence. To be fair, *all* research is inconclusive in that in science, we almost never say we have proven something 100%. Does the Hadopi paper demonstrate with 100% certainty that the law had an effect on iTunes sales? No. But does it demonstrate a few correlations for which the most logical explanation is that hte law had an effect? A scientific journal seems to think so. And having read the paper, so do I. I think what I’m saying is that you should actually bring up an honest, true, objective objection to the paper. So far all you’ve brought up are your unsubstantiated opinions about New Zealand and false claims of the lack of peer review and lack of iphone arguments.

And no, I’m not going to attempt to prove a negative either.

1) The authors didn’t even check to see if iphones could have driven the results. But that claim of yours was proven to be clearly false.

2) The paper was not peer reviewed. You are right that it was not when it was initially released, but I linked you a webpage that at least the author claims it now is. So your claim is again false and now moot.

3) The paper was sponsored by the media industries. I’m not sure how to respond here – you could be right or wrong. All I can find is an acknowledgement saying that one of the authors did some consulting for the music industry, not that the paper was sponsored. But I don’t know what that means.

4) You claim the result is untrue because we did not see similar laws in NZ have the same effect. Where is your evidence of this? How do you know they did not?

I’m not oposed to your point of view, just your fllcious or inconclusive arguments.effect. And yet you provide no evidence that didn’t have this effect.

The Hadopi paper was peer-reviewed at a good economics journal, according to one of the authors. http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~mds/ Now I still agree that it’s interesting that there was an uplift when the law hit peak awareness but not when the notices were sent out – but I would not consider that some clear indicator that the entire study is wrong, especially not with the genre analysis.

It just seems to me that your arguments are based on either things that are false or unproven (like no effect in NZ, or the paper not being peer reviewed.)

No, study of the same thing in another country would be done precisely because you could compare and contrast.

The argument you spout is hilarious. There is no evidence that it didn’t happen so it must have? Really? Frankly, this report is a joke. If it is true, then what it is saying is that HADOPI, in it’s actual implementation, HAS HAD NO EFFECT ON PIRACY WHATSOEVER. At best – the publicity prior to starting this program is the only thing that did. Now, if it was a genuine effect, you’d see another hit at the point it went live (and you don’t) and a gradual change as the first strike letters went out.

And to do that they need to accuse people (many of whom will be totally innocent) based on extremely flawed data (that remains hidden) and rely on a reversal of the burden of proof (and a negative that is impossible to disprove) just to get a solitary “conviction” of a guy they KNEW to be innocent. And they squandered a ton of tax money (more than iTunes ever saw) to do it.

Hope you get convicted under this scheme.

1. Did you read the study? They explicitly covered iphones in Appendix 1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989240

By asking “did you read the study” what I mean is that your arguments seem to make assumptions in order to support your intuition that there was no effect. For example, assuming they did not check into iphones in detail, when they did in fact do so.

2. I agree that people changing behavior at that point is interesting, surprising, and worth questioning. I would mention that in the US, the copyright alert system has not had anywhere NEAR the publicity that hadopi had had. Most people don’t even know about it yet. It’s more the torrentfreak types that know about it. Do we know that there wasn’t a similar uplift in NZ, or was that just an assumption? CAn you find a good control group for NZ and show that NZ did not have a similar uplift in digital music sales compared to the control?

I’m not saying it’s your job to do so, but saying “why did we not see the same thing in NZ” presupposes that we did not. Same for UK really, although the Digital Economy Act seems very very different from Hadopi.

3. Same point as above. Are you sure movie sales did not jump relative to a control group? Or, potentially only digital movie sales, since the authors of the Hadopi study only studied digital music, and cite a bunch of studies showing that today digital consumers tends to prefer to stay digital rather than going physical. In any case, again it seems like your argument is based on an assumption of what happened rather than evidence of what happened. The researchers only studied France, and only digital music, because that’s the data they had. Lack of a study on other countries isn’t proof of much – not many academics would be interested in replicating such a study in other media or other countries, since it would be seen as basically a copy of the Hadopi study and therefore unoriginal.

I don’t know. I’m surprised by the effect, but having read the entire study I think Hadopi really did have this impact – or at least, that that is the most likely explanation for what the researchers observed, given all of the other things that they ruled out.