Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that the HADOPI “three-strikes” system paid off, with unauthorized file-sharing visibly reducing. He released some statistics in order to support his claim.




The France’s president acknowledged that the report he referred to consolidated the undisputed pioneering role of the country in the cultural industries’ adaptation to the digital age. It also shows that since the copyright law was passed two years ago, 95% of people who received the first letter in frames of the “three-strikes” regime have stopped downloading illegal content. In addition, 92% of users who received a second warning also gave up infringing the law. Finally, 98% of people who received a 3rd notice showed the same trend. Besides, the usage of P2P also reduced, but it was before passing the law and continued until September 2011.

A number of other reports reveal the same facts; for instance, Nielsen points at a 17% drop in audience levels, though in NetRatings’ opinion, it reduced in 29%. At the same time, Peer Media Technologies claimed that unauthorized file-sharing had dropped by 43%, and ALPA insisted that the decline was of 66%.

Despite the obvious fact that these statistics are questionable and may not reveal an actual change of behavior in file-sharing, the HADOPI’s report still insists they may. Sarkozy announced that since the “three-strikes” first started in France, peer-to-peer use in the country has been steadily declining throughout the last year.

However, the industry experts admit that many governments fail to realize that neither BitTorrent nor other cyberlockers have the purpose to violate copyright. In fact, their primary goal is to facilitate and make it easier for people to share content through the web. For instance, if you use uTorrent or any other BitTorrent application, it makes your IP address visible to copyright owners and activists. Meanwhile, since copyright legislation has become more and more aggressive and confusing, it’s now natural that subscribers started to hide their identities behind proxies or other services. But Nicolas Sarkozy continues saying that due to the success of the “three-strikes”, which was widely used abroad, France had “very strong credibility with its partners in meeting the challenges facing the cultural industries”.