Peer-to-peer graduated response: In ten years, the number of Internet users using peer-to-peer networks for unlawful purposes has fallen from 8.3 million to 3 million per month, a drop of more than 60%.
Combining an educational approach and deterrence, with a penal component as a last resort, the graduated response is designed to fight unlawful peer-to-peer practices. It lies at the heart of the laws of June 12 and October 28, 2009, which created the Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet (Hadopi).
Centered on an educational component - and then, when this is not sufficient, the implementation of a penal component - the graduated response has contributed over the last ten years, at the same time as the development of legal supplies and the legal actions of rights holders, to reducing unlawful peer-to-peer practices by over 60%.
By 2020, nearly 75% of subscribers who had received one or other notice had put an end to their illegal peer-to-peer practices. The educational phase resulting from the sending of a first and then a second notice and exchanges with the Haute Autorité reminds subscribers of the legal sanctions incurred in the event of repeat offences.
From the creation of Hadopi to the end of the 1st half of 2021, 11% of French people over the age of 15 have already received a notice from Hadopi, corresponding to the sending of 14 million notices.
At the same time, legal action by rights holders to demand the blocking of illegal sites has proved effective, and has intensified. In 2020, an average of 122 domain names were blocked by court order, compared with 17 in 2019.
Online piracy of cultural works still involves more than 12.4 million Internet users every month, across all protocols. Now outpaced by direct streaming and downloading, and while new practices such as unlawful IPTV and live streaming are seeing significant increases, peer-to-peer technology is evolving to meet new usage patterns, integrating the use of infringing content through streaming and live streaming.
Given their decentralized architecture, peer-to-peer concepts and technologies remain essential in the digital age.
The French regulatory authority for audiovisual and digital communication has been given the means to strengthen its anti-piracy tools, enabling it to meet existing and emerging challenges (the growing complexity of the online piracy ecosystem, the ease with which legal rulings can be circumvented, the multiplicity of players involved), while maintaining the graduated response scheme, whose dissuasive pedagogy is increasingly effective.
Peer-to-peer and graduated response: ten years' experience
In addition to a review of the activity and impact of the graduated response since 2011, implemented by Hadopi's Rights Protection Commission, this report offers, for the first time, an exhaustive, cross-disciplinary analysis of peer-to-peer, its history and its future: profiles, behaviors and usage motivations of Internet users using peer-to-peer, technical description of developments in peer-to-peer protocols, and legal analysis of the latter.