“These are spectacular results”. Denis Rapone, member of the college of the new regulator Arcom, (Audiovisual and digital communication regulatory authority), did not hide his satisfaction this morning during the presentation of the first assessment of the fight against piracy led by the super regulator.
It must be said that this new entity only came into operation on January 1 and that it has already provided a balance sheet. 250 illegal sports content services were blocked, representing 63% of illegal viewership at the time it was undertaken.
Certainly, Arcom has recovered the missions and teams of Hadopi created under Nicolas Sarkozy to eradicate the practice of piracy. Denis Rapone himself was president of this High Authority. But the Net regulator has been given other missions and additional legislative tools. This concerns in particular illicit sports content, the subject of which has been taken head-on.
Five court decisions
A new device allows rights holders to seize a judge about one or more sites that illegally broadcast sports competitions. On this basis, these same rights holders seize the Arcom which enjoins the ISPs to block these sites, but also all those which would flourish after the judge’s decision and which would offer these same events.
Thus, only five court decisions have allowed these 250 services to be blocked. Four of them concerned Canal+ and Bein Sports on the occasion of the African Cup of Nations, the Champions League or the Top 14 for rugby. A more recent decision was made in favor of the Professional Football League for leagues 1 and 2.
Of this total, Arcom targeted 140 services “sometimes only a few hours after the referral”, observed Denis Rapone. It is indeed necessary to act as quickly as possible to stick to the retransmissions in progress, under penalty of acting after the battle.
The fight should further intensify in the months to come given the massive nature of these practices. According to data collected by Médiamétrie and published by Arcom, three million French people follow sporting events illegally every month, and 7% of Internet users pay to watch sport illegally.
Agreements should soon be concluded to further automate procedures and save even more time. There remains a thorny question: who will pay the blocking costs? Common ground must be found between ISPs and rights holders.
Target big platforms
Concerning the fight against the piracy of cultural works, the dossier is progressing more slowly. However, the new approach consists in particular of targeting large platforms based on Article 17 of the Copyright Directive.
Because the numbers are still impressive. If we take the field of music, for example, 55% of Internet users access works via sharing platforms such as YouTube and only 36% via dedicated streaming services. Regarding the videographers who post the content, many borrow excerpts subject to copyright and mix them with their own creations.
In short, it’s a bit of a jungle, even if exceptions exist such as the right to parody or quotation. It is no longer a question of letting the giants of the Web decide alone how to handle these situations.
The super regulator is therefore trying to move up a gear regarding the technical tools that will make it possible to identify and remove this problematic content.
Its mission is to evaluate technologies. After a first phase of consultation with the entire ecosystem since the beginning of the year, it must now evaluate these devices before the end of this second quarter.
Rather than leading to the systematic withdrawal of works, Arcom hopes, on the contrary, that licensing contracts will be concluded to remunerate them. On a day-to-day basis, the authority will be there to settle disputes between the various players, whether they are injured rights holders or abusively penalized users.
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The authority is finally preparing to draw up the famous blacklists of sites that seriously and repeatedly infringe copyright. This method of name and shame aims to isolate offenders and drain their resources.
There will also be a repressive component to shut them down. Here again, the operators will be in the front line to block these services and their mirror sites upon referral to Arcom.