{"id":274,"date":"2020-05-27T16:05:43","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T14:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/?p=274"},"modified":"2022-03-07T17:10:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T16:10:46","slug":"regulation-and-consumer-behaviour-lessons-from-hadopi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/regulation-and-consumer-behaviour-lessons-from-hadopi\/","title":{"rendered":"Regulation and Consumer Behaviour: Lessons from HADOPI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The tough French enforcement rules on copyright infringement, dubbed the HADOPI laws, named for the High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights<\/a> on the Internet agency set up to enforce them, can be considered the posterchildren of the so-called \u201cgraduated response\u201d policy, an effort to fight illegal file sharing with the heavy arm of the law. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the rules, consumers are directly contacted if they are found to be sharing content illegally \u2013 and eventually given three warnings, first via e-mail, then via registered mail. The ultimate sanction, though, was a fine of up to \u20ac2000 and, most controversially, the temporary suspension of Internet access. To enforce this, HADOPI needed the full collaboration of Internet service providers \u2013 which they were given by law \u2013 to provide the authority with the personal contact information of the user and to invite the user to install a navigation filter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did this 2009 law work? As it is often the case with public policy and\ntechnology, it is not easy to give a clear answer but luckily the law has been\nwidely studied by scholars and legal analysts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, the law certainly had an impact on public perception. By 2017,\nmore than nine million first warnings had been sent; 846,018 second warnings;\nand 7,886 third warnings, of which 2,146 cases were sent to prosecutors. Even more\nthan the actual numbers, the law was widely publicised, attacked and debated, so\nthat it also affected even those users who did not receive the notification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

When it comes to actual results, the evidence is more contradictory. In\nparticular, an article in the Journal of\nIndustrial Economics<\/a>, provides\nevidence that HADOPI caused an increase of 22.5% in legal music file sales in France\nas compared to a control group of countries which did not implement a similar\nlegislative measure, and that this increase was concentrated in the genre with a\nhigher piracy rate (notably rap). The study has been criticized, but it is a\nrobust, peer reviewed study published in a prestigious journal and based on\nreal market data. Things don\u2019t get much better than that on policy evaluation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The data suggests that HADOPI was, at least partially, successful in\nchanging the behaviour of consumers. Yet at the same time, if we look at long-term\ntrends in revenues, it is clear that it was not HADOPI which solved the problem\nof the music industry \u2013 its positive impact was too small to change a major\ndeclining trend. Legal downloads of music, such as those impacted by the law,\nwere only able to slow the decline. As my Lisbon Council colleague Paul\nHofheinz argued in a previous\nIntermediary Liability Blog post<\/a>, the return to growth in the music industry came\nmostly from the emergence of the subscription based business model \u2013 underpinned\nby innovations such as affordable mobile broadband rates and the rise of\nsmartphones. Interestingly, the same business model is being successfully\nreplicated across different\nindustries<\/a>, from information technology (software as a service) to e-commerce (Blue\nApron meals) to manufacturing (John Deere agriculture technology), leading to\nthe emergence of what some call the \u201csubscription\neconomy<\/a>.\u201d Online subscriptions is already hailed as the secret behind the\nreturn to profitability for newspapers such as The New York Times<\/a>. And it is also\nproviding an opportunity for a new fairer model<\/a> on personal data,\nas correct data processing is clearly linked to benefits in terms of quality of\nservice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a similar note, research from the University\nof Amsterdam<\/a> points out that \u201cthe risk of getting caught\u201d is not a primary factor working\nagainst accessing illegal content. It is actually the least important reason\nacross all countries, <\/strong>including\nFrance, well behind ease of use and findability \u2013 not to mention price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

One of the effect of HADOPI was not to reduce overall piracy rates, but simply to encourage users to move from peer-to-peer to other platforms when accessing copyrighted content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

All this is not an argument against government intervention per se<\/em>. For one, it could be that\npolicies such as HADOPI helped to change customers behaviour towards paying for\ncontent in a way that ultimately also boosted paid alternatives, such as the\nflourishing subscription-based business model. It could be that the failure of\nsimilar coercive measures to reverse the decline helped to convince the music\nindustry to accept the subscription-based model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, it is a healthy reminder that public policies, even when\nambitious and highly restrictive, seldom manage to achieve an impact comparable\nto the introduction and scaling up of new services that meet customer needs.\nAnd that when facing new threats, forward looking experimentation is a more\neffective approach than repression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DAVID OSIMO
David Osimo is director of research at the Lisbon Council. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Download in PDF<\/a>Download<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The tough French enforcement rules on copyright infringement, dubbed the HADOPI laws, named for the High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet agency set up to enforce them, can be considered the posterchildren of the so-called \u201cgraduated response\u201d policy, an effort to fight illegal file sharing with … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Regulation and Consumer Behaviour: Lessons from HADOPI”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[15],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright-infringement","category-illegal-content","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":607,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evidencehub.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}