Is Piracy Part Of The Digital Ecosystem?

The blog Monday Note has an analysis today on digital piracy that suggests that anti-piracy measures like France’s Hadopi are not working, while there is evidence that offering competitive legitimate download sites does work.

“There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers,” Frédéric Filloux wrote in his blog post.

“The sue-them-until-they-die approach is mostly a US-centric one,” he said. “It will never yield great results (aside from huge legal fees) due to the decentralized nature of the internet (there is no central servers for BitTorrent) and to the tolerance in countries in harboring cyberlockers.”

“As for law-based enforcement systems such has the French HADOPI or American SOPA/PIPA, they don’t work either,” he said. “HADOPI proved to be porous as chalk, and the US lawmakers had to yield to the public outcry. Both bills were poorly designed and inefficient.”

The latter refers to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), both of which were derailed last week by large online protests (IPW, US Policy, 20 January 2012).

HADOPI is the French government system which threatens internet users found repeatedly downloading unauthorised content with expulsion from the entire internet.

The music industry announced today that it believes HADOPI is working (IPW, Enforcement, 23 January 2012).