Les efforts pour empêcher l'accès à du streaming piratage de matchs ont conduit les opérateurs télécoms français à bloquer 1 300 sites web, sur demande des chaînes de télévision et sur décision de justice. [Lire la suite]

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Les éditeurs de Pornhub, YouPorn et RedTube ont cherché à challenger la loi française devant les tribunaux, au sujet du contrôle de l'âge des internautes. Mais les verdicts n'ont rien donné. [Lire la suite]

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Le régulateur français des médias a émis une décision obligeant un opérateur satellitaire français de cesser de diffuser trois chaînes de télévision. Le plus fort ? Cette diffusion concerne essentiellement la Russie. [Lire la suite]

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After jumping into the hot seat on January 1, 2022, the fledgling Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (ARCOM) has been battling to reduce piracy in France.

Like many of its European counterparts, Arcom’s main weapon of choice is website blocking. According to a September statement by Arcom president Roch-Olivier Maistre, more than 700 sites were blocked in the first six months of 2022. In the same period, piracy of live sporting events was slashed by 50% , Maistre said.

A new Arcom report published this week offers more detail, including how many pirates have seen site blocking in action and how that affected their decisions moving forward.

Live Sports Universally Consumed by Internet Users

According to Arcom data, 97% of internet users say they have watched live sports events, with 73% claiming to do so on a monthly basis. Almost eight out of ten internet users (79%) utilize legal sources, such as free-to-air TV (63%) or some type of subscription service (37%).

With almost three-quarters of internet users watching in the last six months, football is the king of broadcast sports. In second and third place, runners-up tennis and cycling trail with 62% and 52% of the available audience. Arcom’s mission is to ensure that wherever and whenever possible, consumers are served through existing legal channels or aren’t served at all.

One in Five Have Consumed Illegal Live Streams

Of all internet users in France aged 15 and older, more than one in five (21%) say they have watched live sports via some type of illegal streaming platform. When the platform type is narrowed down to include only regular pirate streaming sites, the figure drops to 13%.

These figures could’ve been much worse but other findings are more of a concern.

The quote you shared suggests that “Almost three-quarters (72%) of the people who watch live sports via illegal streams say they watch sports on a weekly basis, suggesting a level of habit and familiarity with a process that should be getting more difficult due to site blocking. And it’s not as if the French haven’t been trying.

Last month Arcom revealed that 700 pirate sites had been blocked by ISPs in 2022 alone. The agency’s new report reveals that by the end of September 2022, after receiving 41 referrals relating to nine sports competitions, Agcom had referred 481 domains to ISPs for blocking.

That’s on top of the domains referred for blocking following court decisions, making a grand total of 835 pirate sites blocked in the first nine months of the year. Given this huge effort, perhaps the real shocker for rightsholders is that deterrent messaging designed to limit new recruits to streaming piracy is failing pretty badly.

Of all people in France currently consuming pirated live sports streams, 44% say that they only began doing so less than a year ago, a period that directly corresponds with a campaign designed to make piracy more difficult and much less attractive.

Despite these obvious concerns, Arcom data suggests that the blocking message is being delivered, in many cases by practical example.

40% of Pirates Have Personal Experince of Blocking

France has been blocking pirate sites for years but the current campaign is much more intense. Arcom says that when all consumers of pirated sports streams are taken into account, 40% now have personal experience of site blocking, accumulated over the last six months alone.

When added to those pirates who haven’t been blocked themselves but know someone who has, 67% of all live sports streaming pirates now have either direct or indirect knowledge of domain blocking. Arcom says that on average, pirates were blocked from infringing sites 7.3 times in the first six months of the year.

That leaves the million-dollar question: when pirates were presented with an infringement roadblock, did they respond in a way that benefits rightsholders or was blocking seen as a problem in need of another piracy-focused solution?

Good News and Not So Good News

Anti-piracy reports come in a number of flavors but two are seen more often than most.

Depicting falling skies and a looming commercial apocalypse, option one is usually rolled out to elicit helpful responses from lawmakers and governments. As an expensive and sprawling entity that must now deliver on its numerous promises, Arcom has chosen option two, emphasizing success wherever possible.

One example features the reactions of pirates when they discovered that their live sports streaming sites had been blocked by Arcom or the courts.

“The top reaction above all was to abandon illegal sites, true for 48% of Internet users who were confronted with a block,” Arcom’s report reads.

This rather optimistic take is undoubtedly underpinned by honestly obtained data, but it’s actually two components combined. The first might even represent great news for rightsholders.

When faced with a pirate site blockade, 15% of internet users decided that legal platforms showing live sports are a better option than ISPs ‘blocked’ landing pages or blank screens. It’s an optimistic but potentially believable number that, if true, could signal the end of live sports piracy if the pressure is maintained.

The second component is more questionable, almost to the point of being unbelievable.

Pirates Can’t Take The Heat These Days

Arcom’s study claims that after encountering a blocked site, 37% of live sports piracy consumers simply turned off their computers and abandoned pirate sites. It’s the kind of result rightsholders dreamed about when France was still sending millions of warning letters to pirates, along with cash fines and threats of imprisonment.

A 37% reduction in piracy never happened then and nobody seriously entertained the idea it was even possible. At the time, BitTorrent was the dominant method of sharing, something that made them extremely vulnerable to being caught. The complete opposite is true when it comes to today’s streaming sites, yet somehow this leads to spectacular results within months.

A more believable scenario can be found in the 46% of internet users who, when confronted with blocks, used their browsers to visit other pirate sites that hadn’t been blocked. Another realistic finding features a persistent 12% of pirates who, after experiencing blocking, turned to circumvention measures such as VPNs and modified DNS settings.

Arcom: Audience For Pirate Streaming Sites Cut in Half

Arcom’s bottom line is that site blocking has delivered extraordinary results in a very short space of time.

“An initial assessment of these measures shows their effectiveness: the overall audience of illicit live sports streaming sites halved between January and June 2022 (-49%) and more generally by 47% between the 1st half of 2021 and the 1st half of 2022,” its report reads.

If true, these figures would be a great result for the French and a landmark moment in the history of piracy mitigation measures. Somewhat intrigued, we looked at how the data was gathered and by whom.

30,000 People Happily Install Survelliance Software

Arcom’s methodology reveals that 30,000 individuals representative of the French population were studied to determine their visits to 1,941 sites offering pirated live sports streams. The data was provided by established French company Mediametrie using information from its Total Internet Audience product.

TIA monitors participants’ browser habits and histories, plus data relating to app usage, across three screen types; computers, mobile phones and tablets. This is made by possible by participants agreeing upfront to have dedicated surveillance software installed on each of their devices that takes care of the monitoring.

Without being too impolite, anyone who knowingly installs surveillance software on a device and then breaks the law on that device, hasn’t really thought things through. At a bare minimum, it’s not the type of software most pirates would like on their phones, unless they had other devices hidden away.

Nevertheless, since these 30,000 individuals are representative of the entire French population, we can also conclude that 100% of live sports pirates in France are happy to have data relating to their illegal activities put into a database before being shared with a government agency. That’s what the data says, we can’t be more honest than that.

After Huge Success, Arcom Wants More

In summary, live sports piracy is down 49% but Arcom wants even better results to report. From intermediaries and DNS operators to hosting companies and VPN providers, everyone has a role to play in the fight against piracy.

The protection of sports content therefore calls for increased vigilance, by strengthening cooperation through agreements between Internet service providers and sports rights holders, by improving technological blocking solutions and, more broadly, by involving all of the technical intermediaries in the internet ecosystem, such as domain name system (DNS) providers, virtual private networks (VPN) or hosting services, for example, in this fight against piracy.

The ‘Impact of Blocking Illicit Sports Services’ report can be found here (French, pdf)

Image credits: Pixabay / gerelt / qimono

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Le premier rapport de la nouvelle autorité anti-piratage souligne une méconnaissance des internautes quant aux techniques permettant de contourner le blocage de sites piratant les matchs de sport. [Lire la suite]

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La France, un modèle à suivre en matière de lutte contre le streaming illégal de retransmissions sportives ? Depuis le début de l'année, cette forme de piratage a été réduite de moitié, selon l'Arcom.

La France en pointe dans la lutte contre les IPTV illégales

For more than a decade the Hadopi agency (High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet) was seen as the solution to BitTorrent-style peer-to-peer piracy in France.

Hadopi’s goal was to change the behaviors of the majority of French pirates. Ultimately, a preference among pirates for different technologies ended up taking the credit for that. With pirates drawn towards easy-to-use (but still illegal) streaming sites, Hadopi’s BitTorrent-focused anti-piracy toolkit had little chance of making an impact.

On January 1, 2022, France launched the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (ARCOM), which swallowed Hadopi and took on a number of challenges, fighting piracy being just one of them.

Arcom and Rightsholders Waste No Time

With Arcom supporting their every move, various rightsholders stepped up to take advantage of new legislation designed to make pirate site blocking more efficient, to combat mirror sites and proxies, and to further punish sites by restricting appearances in search engines and curtailing advertising opportunities.

A particular emphasis has been placed on protecting live sports such as football, with beIN obtaining the first new-style blocking order in January. European football association UEFA and broadcaster Canal+ later helped to maintain the momentum .

Arcom Reports Constant Success

Big things are expected from Arcom so it was no surprise when the agency reported immediate successes, especially on the site-blocking front.

In April, Arcom reported that 250 sports piracy sites had been blocked, together serving more than 60% of live sports piracy market in France. That certainly didn’t mean that blocking had wiped out more than 60% of the sports piracy market, it just meant that France had blocked some domains operated by 250 of the biggest sites.

In May, another announcement revealed that an additional 150 domains had been targeted, including an unspecified number that attempted to circumvent previously-imposed ISP blocking. The new law was designed with these countermeasures in mind and according to Arcom, things were going as planned.

Blocking Sites is Not Shutting Them Down

There’s no doubt that aggressive site blocking measures are a major inconvenience to pirate site operators. Some may conclude that countermeasures are no longer worth the effort, which in turn could deter others from getting into the piracy game. But there are some harsh realities too.

Site blocking is extremely easy to circumvent. By switching to a DNS provider outside the country (Cloudflare or Google, for example), French users can unblock sites in a couple of minutes, completely free of charge. An Arcom report published earlier this year noted that 19% of internet users had changed their DNS settings.

That figure from Arcom is worth repeating – 19% of internet users changed their DNS settings, not 19% of pirates changed their settings. That’s on top of an estimated 7% of French internet users who operated VPNs in 2021 and as a result are completely unaffected by site-blocking measures.

Perhaps even more importantly, site blocking does not take pirate sites offline. Indeed, site blocking is a direct response to anti-piracy groups being unable to take pirate sites offline, at least in any significant numbers. Nevertheless, Arcom mostly chooses to focus on big numbers and in some cases, incredibly big numbers.

France Achieves More in Six Months Than Any Country, Ever

After a relatively slow start when compared to Italy or the UK, by 2015 France had blocked 18 sites and has steadily added large batches ever since. However, since January 1, 2022, success rates have reportedly gone through the roof.

In April, Arcom reported ( pdf ) that France’s site-blocking efforts meant that the audience for the top 14 blocked sites could now be reported at -100%. In addition, site-blocking measures had caused piracy of Europe’s prestigious Champions League football competition to plummet by 76% in France. But more was to come.

In a speech this month to the French Senate’s Committee for Culture, Education and Communication, Arcom president Roch-Olivier Maistre noted that piracy of cultural and sports content costs France a billion euros per year. However, the new and “highly responsive” legal framework has new procedures to combat the threat, including those that accommodate the inherent urgency of blocking live sports piracy streams.

As a result, more than 700 sites have been blocked in France since January, with incredible effectiveness. According to Maistre, in the first six months of 2022, piracy of all live sports in France via the internet was slashed by 50% ( pdf ) .

To put that into perspective, both the UK and Italy are engaged in some of the most aggressive site-blocking programs ever seen across Europe yet can’t get anywhere near the results reported by France. Live sports piracy is up in the UK and since 2019, consumption of live sports has increased by half in Italy.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

L'Arcom veut accélérer l'interdiction des sites pornographiques, mais ces derniers vont avoir encore un peu de répit.

Blocage des sites pornographiques : Pornhub a encore un peu de répit

Faced with the impossibility of filing lawsuits against every single site offering content without a license, rightsholders all over the world are now fully invested in site blocking.

Whether the process begins with a court injunction or utilizes an administrative framework (or both), rightsholders are causing hundreds of sites and associated domains to be blocked by ISPs every month. Those seeking a clear and panoramic view of the scale of site blocking measures will find an opaque system, one that seems designed to limit how much information is made available to the public.

That being said, actions that begin in court can shine some light on who is obtaining blocking orders. In France, premium TV company Canal+ has reentered the fray with what appears to be the first injunction designed to reduce piracy of Formula 1.

High Court in Paris Says ‘Oui’

New legislation in France allows rightsholders to enter an accelerated legal process that authorizes “proportionate measures” to prevent online infringement. In January, sports broadcaster beIN became the first company to obtain a blocking order protecting football rights.

Ongoing blocking now supports beIN, football league UEFA, and local broadcaster Canal+, with the latter now expanding its campaign to underpin the company’s new contract with Formula 1.

Lequipe reports that the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris has granted a Canal+ application to render inaccessible 39 pirate sites offering unlicensed Formula 1 streams. The order covers four major French ISPs – Bouygues, Orange, Free, and SFR.

The order won by Canal+ is ‘dynamic’, meaning that when pirates take countermeasures with new domains, mirror sites or proxies, the Arcom regulator has the power to add new domains to the list and compel the ISPs to block them. In a sign of how quickly these updates can take place, the original order to block 39 domains has already expanded to 59 domains and probably won’t stop there.

Local reports indicate that the ISP blocks are DNS-based, meaning that internet users who switch to third-party DNS providers (such as Google or Cloudflare) are unaffected by the blockades. Whether the authorities will seek to close this loophole remains to be seen but at least for now, blocking is moving full steam ahead in France.

Hundreds of Domains Blocked Since January

During a press conference in April, Arcom announced that since its inception in January, 250 sports piracy sites had been blocked, together representing more than 60% of the country’s ‘pirate’ sports audience. By mid-May, the number of pirate sites blocked had swelled to around 400, a figure that includes sites blocked by court order and any additional sites reappearing to circumvent blocking.

Arcom says that at least 1,200 additional pirate sites have also been blocked by French ISPs resulting in dramatic falls in piracy, including a reported 77% decline in piracy of the Champions League competition.

Whether any of this activity will translate to consumers spending more on legitimate services remains to be seen but that’s unlikely to be a prominent feature in anti-piracy reports, at least on the same slides. Graphs tend to show how effective blocking is at preventing users from visiting blocked domains, not how effective they are at converting former pirates to paying customers.

In that respect, France also has additional problems of its own making that seem to fuel piracy , rather than discourage it.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.