In France, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea strikes schemes are baked into law, a similar policy is in place in Ireland, and last year the United States rolled out its voluntary “alert” system commonly known as six-strikes.

The goal of these policies is to track down copyright infringers and warn them that their behavior is not acceptable. After repeat warnings, these accused file-sharers then face a penalty ranging from a fine to prolonged Internet disconnection.

But are these programs the anti-piracy silver bullet copyright holders believe them to be? A new paper published by researchers from the U.S. and France suggests they’re not.

Based on a large survey among 2,000 French Internet users, the study finds that the local three strikes law didn’t stop or even reduce piracy.

“Consistent with theoretical predictions, our econometric results indicate that the Hadopi law has not deterred individuals from engaging in digital piracy and that it did not reduce the intensity of illegal activity of those who did engage in piracy,” the researchers write in their paper.

“While several factors affect the perceived probability of detection under the law, our results show that the propensity to engage in illegal file-sharing is independent of these beliefs,” they add.

In other words, threatening to punish people for online piracy does nothing to reduce copyright infringement. A result that’s independent of people’s perceived chance of getting caught.

One weakness of the “strikes” systems is that they only cover P2P file-sharing, and not any of the alternative ways people use to download pirated material. This leaves the option open for Internet users to switch to these unmonitored services, but the researchers don’t find any evidence that this is happening across the board.

The results do suggest that those who have more pirates in their social networks switch to alternatives, such as direct download sites and newsgroups.

“There is evidence that the law encourages Internet users who better understand the law and alternative piracy channels (those with many digital pirates in their social network) to substitute away from the monitored P2P channel and to obtain content through unmonitored illegal channels,” the researchers write.

Overall the searchers conclude that the three-strikes law failed to curb piracy, suggesting that similar initiatives such as the U.S. six-strikes scheme are not very effective either.

Previously the French government sanctioned a panel to investigate the effectiveness of their three strikes law. This panel concluded that the law had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It also recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for infringers should be dumped, which happened soon after.

While disconnections are now off the table, the graduated response scheme lives on in France for now. But according to this new research, it is unlikely to achieve much in the fight against piracy.

Update: We initially linked to the wrong paper, the article was updated with the right link.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The results of this evaluation, the most elaborate that has been published to date, was published this week in a 61-page article. Talking to TorrentFreak, Giblin says that the goal of the paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of graduated response schemes on three measures that are closely aligned with the purpose of copyright law.

What’s the evidence that these policies reduce infringement? What’s the evidence that they increase the size of the legitimate market? What evidence is there to show that they encourage the creation and dissemination of a wide range of content?

The paper shows that the graduated response schemes fail on all accounts.

“Rightsholders make big claims that graduated responses are ‘successful’ and ‘effective’ to argue for their continued adoption, but the evidence doesn’t back them up. The paper finds little to no evidence that any form of graduated response reduces infringement or increases the size of the legitimate market,” Giblin tells TorrentFreak.

The paper mentions, for example, that all of the studies that claim to have found a reduction in P2P usage are biased towards copyright holders and not peer-reviewed. In addition, they consistently ignore that people may have switched to other forms of piracy, through streaming websites and cyberlockers.

Similarly, a study suggesting that iTunes sales went up in France after Hadopi was announced, is criticized as the effect may very well be explained by third factors such as the surge in iPhone sales. The results are further put into doubt as revenues in the French music industry as a whole decreased, while there was a clear uptick in nine of the top 20 markets over the same period.

The third measure of effectiveness, whether the “strike” schemes improve access to and the creation of content, doesn’t pass the test either.

“Regarding the third aim, it finds that France is the only jurisdiction to really require rightholders to provide greater access to content in exchange for their new enforcement rights. However, it finds that many existing graduated responses have structural biases in favour of so-called ‘Big Content’,” Giblin tells us.

Giblin says that not all copyright holders are treated equally under the graduated response schemes. The major music labels and movie companies often have more influence, if smaller parties are allowed to participate at all.

Despite this, the major industry players may not see an increase in production either, since there is no solid evidence that fewer people are pirating.

“In reality graduated responses are unlikely to actually result in greater production even of that type because they don’t actually reduce infringement or increase the size of legitimate markets; but this demonstrates a level of structural capture in the lawmaking process that is deeply troubling,” Giblin says.

On the upside Giblin notes that the movie and music industries are breaking revenue records year after year. However, there’s no evidence any of these are the result of graduated response schemes.

In fact, the expensive anti-piracy policies may be a losing strategy which policy makers have to reconsider.

“International policymakers considering adoption need to carefully consider the policy aims they wish to achieve, and evaluate whether a graduated response would actually help them to do so. They cannot simply accept rightholders’ claims of ‘success’ or ‘effectiveness’ at face value,” Giblin says.

“Regulators who already have graduated responses should also do a cost/benefit analysis in light of the evidence, and decide whether it’s desirable to keep them,” she adds.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

According to the theory, Internet subscribers who are continually warned that their behavior is being monitored will, sooner or later, change their attitudes and stop obtaining content from unauthorized sources.

One of the first countries to see value in the idea was France, and under the supportive eye of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, Hadopi was born. The taxpayer-funded agency would oversee monitoring of Internet subscribers along with a mechanism for sending them successive warnings, each designed to be more worrying than the last. Controversially, the final warning would result in Internet disconnection.

However, the idea that these threats would entice subscribers into music and movie stores and away from unauthorized sites in a meaningful way never came to be. In June, a nine-member panel lead by former Canal Plus chairman Pierre Lescure produced a 700 page report advising on policies for advancing entertainment industries in the digital age.

Among other things, the panel concluded that the three strikes mechanism had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It also recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for infringers should be dumped.

That recommendation has now been carried out by the French Government.

Earlier this morning the Ministry of Culture published official decree No. 0157 of July 9, 2013 which removed “the additional misdemeanor punishable by suspension of access to a communication service.”

The changes come too late for the only individual to have fallen foul of France’s disconnection law. In June and after millions of warnings sent, a single Internet subscriber was fined 600 euros and suspended from the Internet for two weeks after failing to respond to “strike” notices.

Today’s changes by the French don’t mean that infringing file-sharers can relax though. The decree goes on to explain that file-sharing offenses may still be punishable by a fine, up to 1500 euros in the case of gross negligence.

To this end, the decree clarifies that ISPs must provide access to names, address and other personal details of subscribers in order to facilitate the implementation of a system for issuing automating file-sharing fines. Disconnections may have been removed, but the war against individuals will continue.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This was in the middle of the copyright industry’s “mass disconnection” strategy, where they saw it fit to legislate mass disconnections to protect their obsolete industry.

Fortunately for everybody else, an election interrupted the otherwise-prepared legislative process, and a new European Parliament got to finalize the bills that would have made such disconnections possible throughout Europe. It was obvious that the bill was intended to pass without discussion.

Unfortunately for the copyright industry, the Pirate Party got a seat on the final negotiating committee in the European Parliament, and we were able to – with the help of brilliant activists like Monica Horten – educate everybody else on the parliamentary committee as to what was actually happening. It stopped being a matter of having Parliament steamrolled into just passing the bill without question, and escalated into a matter of Parliament’s dignity. “We’re the Parliament, not a doormat”, as some legislators made very clear.

That derailed the intended process of enabling “Three Strikes” disconnections across Europe. The very opposite became law, in no small part thanks to the footwork of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament and that negotiation committee.

The civil rights violations that the French Hadopi agency intended to carry out – disenfranchising people from most of their civil liberties – was specifically targeted when writing the language for the Telecoms Package bills. The language of the bills was not good enough until it made super clear that disconnecting anybody from the net without a prior fair and full adversarial court proceeding – exactly the thing the copyright industry had intended to bypass and cut citizens off en masse – was completely illegal across all of the European Union, and by extension, through the European Economic Area.

The text in the Telecoms Package bill had to pass the “Hadopi Test”, as it was actually called in the European Parliament – making it absolutely clear that what Hadopi intended to do was to be made completely illegal.

For today, we exercise all our fundamental liberties – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of expression – through the net. Therefore, the net has itself become just as fundamental a liberty as all the other fundamental liberties we exercise through it.

It shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion that you can’t cut anybody off from the net, not any more than you can order them to not read newspapers, not meet anybody, or not speak.

But alas, the copyright industry is infamous for ignoring the law completely when they don’t like what it says, and throwing loud tantrums when anybody else doesn’t do what they demand (sometimes regardless of law). They seem to be stuck in the “mine, mine, mine, waaaaaah” mindset of a three-year-old, and what’s worse, they’re completely oblivious to the concept of equality before the law.

The Hadopi bureaucrats who made the decision of cutting somebody off from the net and their fundamental rights this week deserve to go to jail for a considerable time, so they can contemplate the concept of being equal before the law; how the law isn’t intended to protect the copyright industry against the people but never the other way around. Unfortunately, that will not happen under French law, but the Hadopi can and should still be sued for ridiculously punitive amounts in European courts for this deed. There is no way they can claim ignorance of the law in this matter, and even if they are arguably ignorant, that’s still not a defense.

As a final note, it seems copyright monopoly lobbyists think they can get this disconnection scheme in Britain now, too. I would encourage anybody in the affected countries – France and Britain – to sue the shirt off their backs. What they’re attempting to do is illegal. Not “maybe illegal”, not “possibly in a grey area”, but “deliberately targeted behavior written into law as specifically illegal”.

Update: In response to the opinion above some commenters rightfully point out that the disconnection order comes from a judge. These and other issues are discussed below, feel free to add yours.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The customer in question will be without Internet access for two weeks and must also pay a 600 euro fine. Quoting officials, PC Inpact reports that the file-sharer was caught sharing one or two files and failed to respond to earlier warnings.

If no appeal is filed within 10 days the file-sharer’s Internet provider will move forward with the disconnection. For 15 days the customer will be denied access to the Internet, but the ISP must ensure that e-mail, instant messaging and other VOIP services continue to work.

The sentencing comes at a peculiar time. Last month a nine-member panel recommended that the Government scraps the Hadopi agency, the body that currently oversees the graduated response system.

In a detailed report the panel concluded that although there was a reduction in file-sharing on P2P networks such as BitTorrent, there had also been an increase in use of other services such as streaming sites and cyberlockers which are not covered by Hadopi. In addition the panel concluded that the three-strikes scheme had failed to benefit legal services.

The ineffectiveness of the three-strikes policy was confirmed two weeks ago by a music industry group. In a separate report the group concluded that the anti-piracy law had failed to halt the decline in music sales.

But while Hadopi might be dead soon, file-sharing penalties are not going away.

Based on a recommendation from the panel, the Government now plans to replace the current system of Internet disconnections with automated fines. Under Hadopi, fines extended to a theoretical maximum of around 1,500 euros, but these are now expected to be reduced to around 60 euros each, but with increases applied to repeat offenders.

The Government presented the new automated warning system as a better deal, since no one would be at risk of losing access to the Internet. However, at the time of the announcement this statement made little sense.

“They pretended it would be a better deal for internet users, but it wasn’t. No one had been convicted to a suspension of Internet access, and we all believed no one ever would. With the recent conviction they can now claim they are right, and defend their new legislation,” Guillaume Champeau of French news site Numerama told TorrentFreak in a comment.

“The timing is really the best one possible for the Government. But was the sentencing totally independent, or did it follow instructions that suited a political agenda?”

Despite having the first conviction in the bag, the Hadopi law will go down in history as a failed experiment. However, the announced changes are certainly no win for file-sharers as the automated system takes away judicial oversight, opening up the possibility of thousands of people being issued with fines every week.

Time will tell whether that’s going to happen.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After the realization that it had not been effective, one of the report’s recommendations was to scrap the Hadopi agency, the body that currently administers the so-called “Three Strikes” anti-piracy system.

The conclusion was that although a reduction in illicit file-sharing on P2P networks such as BitTorrent had been achieved, there had also been an increase in use of other services, including streaming, over which Hadopi has no control. More importantly – crucially, one might argue, the panel concluded that the three strikes mechanism had failed to benefit authorized services as promised.

Syndicat National de l’édition Phonographique (SNEP), an industry anti-piracy group that championed the uptake of three strikes, has just produced its first quarter results for 2013 and they seem to back up the panel’s findings. Somewhat predictably they show no halt to the slide in music sales.

In the first three months of the year the wholesale market for recorded music was worth 107.9 million euros in France, down 6.7% on the same period last year. Overall in 2012, sales fell 4.4%

In Q1 2013, physical sales (CDs etc) fell by 7.3% and for the first time ever digital sales (iTunes etc) were also hit – down 5.2%.

SNEP lays the blame for the decline in digital revenues at the feet of a label deal that expired in 2012 and a YouTube agreement with rights group SACEM that was suspended until the second quarter of 2013. Without these “unusual” issues digital revenues would have been stable, SNEP says, but stability will be disappointing when compared to the 12% growth enjoyed in 2012.

Stats on actual downloads show that the boom predicted by the industry once French Internet users began receiving their first, second and third strikes, has simply failed to appear.

While downloads of albums demonstrated a little growth – 1.9 million albums were bought in Q1 2013 compared to 1.8 million in Q1 2012 – the singles market is suffering. During the first quarter of 2013 the number of downloaded singles was down 21% on the same period last year – 10.7 million tracks versus 13.7 million in 2012.

Overall market share for digital content remained stable at 29%, versus a worldwide average of 35%.

So, with the market still in decline, what next for France? Well, evidently “three strikes” won’t be missed. As highlighted by Numerama, France has actually experienced a greater reduction in sales than Germany (- 4.6%), Italy ( – 1.8%), the Netherlands (- 4.7%) and Great Britain (- 5.6%), none of which have a three strikes scheme.

Hopes are now being pinned on a series of automated fines of 60 euros each for those sharing content without permission, with increases applied to those who don’t get the message. Why fines should be anymore successful than strikes is anyone’s guess, but SNEP like the idea – as long as the fines are more punishing.

“Music producers clearly want the educational component but it must be accompanied by a sufficiently dissuasive sanction. A fine of 60 euros seems too low, it should be at least double!” says SNEP chairman, Guillaume Leblanc.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last August, French Minister of Culture Aurélie Filippetti commissioned former Canal Plus chairman Pierre Lescure to advise on policies for pushing forward local entertainment industries in the digital age.

Yesterday a nine-member panel, lead by Lescure, produced a 700 page report. It recommends that the Hadopi agency, the body that currently administers the so-called “Three Strikes” system, should be resigned to history after spending tens of millions of euros but achieving just one 150 euro fine during its reign.

The report said that the anti-piracy regime had not been effective. Although a reduction in illicit file-sharing on P2P networks such as BitTorrent had been achieved, there had also been an increase in use of other services, including streaming, over which Hadopi has no control. Moreover, legal offerings haven’t benefited as promised.

But contrary to hopes that the so-called ‘graduated response’ would die along with Hadopi, the report suggests that the agency’s tasks, including that of fighting Internet piracy on the ground, should be handed over to the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), the agency which regulates electronic media in France.

However, things will change. The thorny issue of Internet disconnection for infringement, which generated the most controversy but was never actually exercised, looks set to be replaced by a system of automated fines after two warnings, as suggested earlier by the music industry.

Under Hadopi, fines extended to a theoretical maximum of around 1,500 euros, but recommendations by Lescure suggest that these should be reduced to around 60 euros each, but with increases applied to repeat offenders. The panel also recommend decriminalization, so offenses of this nature do not call on police resources or result in a criminal record.

Instead of primarily targeting citizens, France should refocus its anti-infringement drive towards more organized for-profit sources of piracy, Lescure said. Search engines and advertising agencies should be encouraged to help in the fight, but domain seizures and blocking were not advised due to the risk of causing collateral damage.

The abolition of Hadopi was among a list of 75 proposals handed to French president François Hollande yesterday. Others include a 1% tax on smartphones, tablet, laptops and other Internet-enabled devices.

“Companies that make these tablets must be made to contribute some of the revenue from their sales to help creators,” said Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti.

Revenue raised – an estimated 86 million euros – would be funneled back into French movies, music and other art and would replace current levies on recordable media such as blank CD/DVDs, hard drives and memory.

French lawmakers are now expected to review the recommendations and report back during the summer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.