The high authority will have several tools

After debates agitated on the political stage and in public opinion, the Constitutional Council finally censored the law creation and Internet, believing that the terms of the punishment infringed freedom of expression and communication. A new version was passed on first reading by the Senate and is under consideration by the Assembly. It still provides warning to Internet users illegally downloading cuts access to Internet and possible fines.

If the importance of illegal downloading and the need for a deterrent mechanism seem obvious, the links between the instructional warning, punishment and the behaviour of Internet users are complex to clarify and have not yet been sufficiently studied. The issue is. If the high authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of the rights on the Internet (Hadopi) managed to encourage a good number of Internet users preferred the legal offer, the creative act and the Internet will be a success. However, if after two years of graduated response, the use of the legal supply of France is behind our neighbours, the Act will have been a failure because only remembered its repressive aspect.

The debate has been much too focused on mechanisms for sanctions to be implemented to deter piracy. This debate should be exceeded by substantive considerations to move forward and help the reconfiguration of these industries and the redefinition of economic models for content and creating innovations.

The real issue of the Hadopi will be put in place the conditions for the development of legal offers content, better adapted to the tastes of consumers and their buying habits. To succeed, the high authority must use all the tools at its disposal to bring the average surfer to a legal offer rich and easy to access. Hard-core hackers will in any event outside the law, and one of the priorities of the new authority will be to not push the average Internet user to illegality.

The consumer is not only responsible for the current situation. Content publishers have failed to bring a legal offer sufficiently attractive, and some technical intermediaries, on the pretext of promoting broadband or to increase traffic to their sites, brought to consumers on a plateau of money from tools to defraud. The high authority will have several tools. First, warning and sanction regime must be defined more subtly to not push the average Internet user to fraud. Moreover, the labelling will allow the authority to ensure that the technical means available to the user to prevent illicit will be designed to encourage their adoption by the greatest number. Finally the authority has a general mission of observation and promotion of the legal offer that will enable studies, search for international "benchmarks", conduct experiments, or even animate reflection groups like the working groups of the Arcep on broadband.

One of the priority actions of the authority will be to launch serious economic studies on the behaviour of users in different scenarios of warning and legal supply and assess the impacts on the business models of publishers and content producers. Some American universities have shown, for example, that the sending of a warning during the Act of illegal download was more effective than the sending of an e-mail message a few weeks after. So should draw on the experiences of other countries, but also other sectors.

The high authority must certainly be guided by these different experiences to define the tools most appropriate to the problem of illegal downloading while ensuring, in cooperation with the technical intermediaries and content publishers, the development of innovative content.

Finally, an important note dimension is that illegal downloading is not always motivated by the desire to extract of the traditional system based on the price. In other words, all downloads are not intended to substitute for the purchase of original works. A large number of downloaded content illegally have the particularity of experience goods, i.e. goods whose quality can be revealed during the Act of consumption. Consumers can use to download to test content and available in a manner lawful those of between - them that correspond exactly to their taste. This type of download product benefits to content providers since he then reduced their marketing and promotion costs. The authority could look solutions deployed on some community sites, where content publishers have made the deliberate choice to allow the free use of their works under well-defined conditions.

Will in any event the use of the graduated response only not lead to a virtuous behaviour of all the actors. It must articulate with many other actions. It is by acting on several levers at once, by looking at the international and adjusting fire at all times that the Government and Arcep have enabled the France to become a leader in broadband penetration. The high authority should try to replicate this success in innovative legal solutions. It is now urgent that the debate is pulled only problem of the definition of the system of penalty turn resolutely to the future by focusing resources on the development of innovative content offerings.