This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Legal
Research questions efficiency of three-strikes
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 27 January 2014
The effectiveness of graduated-response anti-piracy systems has always been debated, with research both bigging up and doing down just what can be achieved from having internet service providers write to suspected file-sharers, usually threatening some kind of sanction if they don’t stop their evil file-sharing ways.
The most recent report disses such systems, reckoning that the three-strikes process introduced in France – one of the more draconian initiatives on paper, albeit with relatively little bite in practice – achieved approximately nothing. The report, from American and French researchers, is based on a survey of 2000 net users in France.
According to Torrentfreak, the researchers conclude: “Consistent with theoretical predictions, our econometric results indicate that the Hadopi [three-strikes] law has not deterred individuals from engaging in digital piracy and that it did not reduce the intensity of illegal activity of those who did engage in piracy. While several factors affect the perceived probability of detection under the law, our results show that the propensity to engage in illegal file-sharing is independent of these beliefs”.
The researchers also noted that for those net users with closer links to the piracy community – a classification based on the piracy chat in said users’ social networks – the introduction of three-strikes in France, which targeted exclusively P2P file-sharing, pushed file-sharers down other routes to accessing unlicensed content.
Which means that the three-strikes system is more likely to catch less prolific file-sharers who, the researchers noted, were less likely to switch to other sources of content, but still continued to file-sharer despite the high profile launch of the French three-strikes system.
The researchers said: “There is evidence that the law encourages internet users who better understand the law and alternative piracy channels (those with many digital pirates in their social network) to substitute away from the monitored P2P channel and to obtain content through unmonitored illegal channels”.
While the research seems to confirm that the introduction of three-strikes does not act as a deterrent to file-sharing, even when the launch of the anti-piracy measures is high profile, what isn’t clear here is what impact actually receiving a warning letter has. It should also be noted that France’s three-strikes system, as a result of a shift in opinion in the country’s political community, never properly got to the net-suspension stage which, if enacted, might have had more impact in terms of deterrent.
Nevertheless, the report will provide new ammunition to those who argue that three-strikes is an expensive, excessive anti-piracy measure with limited potential for actually combating online infringement.
