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.

L'autorité de régulation du numérique met en demeure le site « Jacquie et Michel » de mieux contrôler l'âge des internautes. Le dispositif actuellement mis en place ne donne pas pleine satisfaction. [Lire la suite]

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Les sites porno sont dans le collimateur de l'Arcom, le régulateur des communications numériques. Ils doivent mettre en place un système de vérification de l'âge de l'internaute, mais PornHub estime que cela contrevient aux principes inscrits dans la Constitution.

Blocage des sites porno : PornHub contre-attaque

At the start of this year, a new bill went into effect in France that created a new regulatory body .

The old HADOPI anti-piracy outfit merged with the Higher Audiovisual Council, creating the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority ( Arcom ).

In addition to the organizational change, the anti-piracy outfit was given new powers as well. For example, Arcom maintains a blacklist of problematic sites and mirrors, which various service providers can use to block or delist the associated domains.

The outfit also has the power to swiftly order online services to take down unlicensed streams of live sporting events. This is in line with EU legislation which prescribes swift takedown procedures for live broadcasts.

Cannes Piracy Roundtable

This week, Arcom board member Denis Rapone gave the first public speech before an audience of film industry people at the Cannes Festival. Rapone lauded movie companies’ legal efforts over the past decade and stressed that France is an ally in the fight against piracy.

“We share a unifying fight: that of protecting French creation and its vitality against the predatory scourge of piracy,” Rapone said, at a roundtable discussion.

Rapone went on to acknowledge that a lot of progress was already made over the past years. Copyright holders have successfully demanded ISP blockades against hundreds of pirate sites in court, for example. In addition, HADOPI’s graduated response scheme also put a dent in piracy figures.

This has stopped the growth of piracy in France and in recent years the number of pirate site visits is trending down. However, with millions of people still using unauthorized sources regularly, more work has to be done.

“These serious and repeated infringements of copyright, perpetrated on a large scale, are not acceptable,” Rapone said. “It is time for the public authorities to step in and forcefully take action in the context of the new opportunities available to them.”

Arcom is happy to pick up the gauntlet. The government agency has the power to flag illicit sources and take swift and effective action. It has already booked some success on this front, by shutting down live streams of sporting events.

France Commits to Fighting Piracy

As Arcom’s appearance at the Cannes Film Festival shows, the authorities are also lending a hand to the movie industry.

“We can be pleased that France has chosen to make the protection of creation and the eradication of piracy a major objective of public policy. This can only be achieved through the combined determination and mobilization of creative actors and public authorities,” Rapone notes.

The speech is accompanied by a brief presentation that backs up some of the claims. Relying on EUIPO research , it shows that piracy has started to decline. Within Europe, France is at the bottom half of all countries ranked by the average number of visitors to pirate sites.

This is a positive sign indeed, but looking more closely there’s something that stands out. If we only count the “movie piracy” visits, France ends up much higher on the lists. In fact, French people visit movie piracy sites more often than those in the countries with the highest piracy counts.

Mandatory Release Windows & Piracy

Whether this was discussed during the roundtable discussion is unknown. However, it is likely that French policy is one of the reasons for this outlier.

For more than two decades, France has had a “ media chronology ” law that gives an exclusive release window to movie theaters. This applies to video rentals but also to streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+.

Up until this year, streaming services could not show a film within three years of its movie theater premiere. This was recently shortened to 17 months for Disney and Amazon, and 15 months for Netflix, as the latter agreed to an annual investment of €190m in local movie and TV content.

These restrictions don’t apply to content that’s exclusively streamed online. However, for Disney, it means that it can’t show its blockbuster movie releases on Disney+ for more than a year.

Needless to say, it can be quite frustrating for French movie fans to see people all over the world enjoying recent films on streaming services, while they can’t. The movie theaters, for their part, are quite pleased.

Perhaps it’s a controversial suggestion, but could it be that these mandatory release windows are actually motivating some people to watch the films through pirate sites instead?

That might be something Arcom could look into in the future. After all, when it comes to defeating piracy, the authorities shouldn’t just look at the illegal supply, but also at the legal alternatives.

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

"L'homophobie ce n'est pas une opinion mais un délit (...) C'est une honte"

Le joueur du PSG, Idrissa Gueye, refuse de jouer lors de la journée de lutte contre l’homophobie : Doit-il être sanctionné ? Le violent clash entre @gillesverdez et @Mdelormeau ! #TPMP pic.twitter.com/jSkR6AFvZT

— TPMP (@TPMP) May 18, 2022

Raymond (Cyril) Aabou à l'instant dans #TPMP en parlant des homosexuels "il faut que vous compreniez qu'aux yeux d'une partie de la population vous n'êtes pas normaux"

Bon allez on va se brancher sur le site de l'ARCOM. pic.twitter.com/JLFlrVIe9r

— Julien Pernici (@JulienPernici) May 19, 2022

Les chéris toutes les formes de violence, de haine, de discrimination, d intolérance sont à bannir. Je suis peut être dans le monde des bisounours mais j y crois. On peut y arriver. pic.twitter.com/ZVmw9TNBQu

— Cyril Hanouna (@Cyrilhanouna) May 19, 2022

Les amis j’ai été très maladroit ce soir apparemment certain on compris totalement l’inverse de mes propos ..ce que je voulais dire c’est qu’il y encore beaucoup de chemin à faire mais ça va dans le bon sens.. Qu’on vive ensemble bordel ..vive la vie ❤️❤️❤️

— Raymond (@RaymondLeMatin) May 19, 2022