France Ready To Shut Down Hadopi As It's 'Incompatible' With Digital Economy

Failures

from the well,-duh dept

It’s amazing how frequently we still hear from entertainment industry folks or politicians pointing to Hadopi as an example of “success” in a three strikes program. Of course, the reality is that it has been a colossal failure by nearly every measure possible. The industry has had to seriously massage the statistics, but they can’t deny the simple fact that it hasn’t helped drive sales, which really seems like the key metric. In fact, the latest reports show that music sales — including digital sales — have continued to drop. Even more telling: the decline in sales in France has outpaced the decline elsewhere. In other words, nothing about Hadopi worked.

Even when Hadopi finally “convicted” someone, it was someone that everyone agreed didn’t pirate songs. In the meantime, French users for services not tracked by Hadopi have skyrocketed. It was only a matter of time before politicians began questioning why they were spending so much money on a system with no real benefit. The result, as we noted a few weeks ago, was a recommendation to kill off Hadopi, though potentially to replace it with other bad ideas.

Either way, it looks like it’s almost guaranteed that Hadopi is going away, a failure on nearly every level. What struck me as most interesting, however, is the reasoning given by the politician in charge of internet policy in France:

Fleur Pellerin, the French minister in charge of Internet policy, said during a recent visit to a high-technology complex in Sweden that suspending Internet connections was incompatible with the French government’s hopes of spurring growth in the digital economy.

“Today, it’s not possible to cut off Internet access,” she said. “It’s something like cutting off water.”

Well, duh. And while that’s true “today” that was also true when Hadopi was put in place, and many, many people explained that to French officials. So we’ve got the French government recognizing that the program was a complete disaster. It cost too much, it shut off internet access which goes against any hope of “spurring a digital economy,” it put guilt on innocent parties and it did nothing to help sales.

Given all of this, why is it that politicians still take the same RIAA/MPAA ideas seriously when they propose their latest braindead scheme to try to pretend they live in a different, non-digital era?

Filed Under: copyright, france, hadopi, three strikes