© Lemon squeezer/Unsplash Glenn Carstens-Peters
The audience for piracy sites is declining in France if we are to believe the 2023 annual report published by Arcom. This very instructive study by the independent public authority thus concludes that “the joint action of rights holders, the judicial authority and Arcom proved to be appropriate and fruitful”.
Measures against IPTV
In detail, the analysis revealed that 16% of the Internet user population has consumed illicitly dematerialized cultural and sporting goods, or around 8.5 million Internet users. This remains important, but Arcom prefers to see the glass half full and the drop of 27% compared to 2021 (11.7 million fraudsters listed).
And the body, which inherited the missions of Hadopi, adds: “If the decline in the use of streaming, direct downloading and peer-to-peer is confirmed, this contrasts with a slight increase in live streaming. This can be explained in particular by the development of new methods of broadcasting such as internet television (IPTV) or the use of social networks to share links allowing illegal access to live content”.
Overall, the judicial decisions concerned internet service providers (ISPs) with the establishment of measures aimed at preventing access from French territory to services illicitly broadcasting sports broadcasts (from 772 in 2022 to 1,544 in 2023). However, search engines have also had dereferencing measures imposed in addition to blocking. The targets are well known to the general public: they are mainly illegal live streaming sites and IPTV services.
To go further, Arcom is now calling for “the involvement of alternative VPN and DNS providers in the application of the law, alongside ISPs& #8221;. Indeed, these are increasingly used by Internet users to access pirated content.
Piracy is still in full swing in France
The fight is in any case far from won. According to a recent report recently published by Access (Association of Thematic Channels), 5.1% of the population regularly uses IPTV platforms to access cultural and sporting content illegally.
This is very expensive for the rights holders. During a Senate hearing in 2022, Maxime Saada, CEO of the Canal+ group, made an impression by saying: “The Canal+ group's first competitor is piracy !”. Illicit viewing of content would cost French thematic channels 500 million euros each year. To better understand the reasons that push Internet users towards these illegal services, we invite you to reread our previous article here.
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