Study - Illegal use of films on Wawacity
The unlawful diffusion of works by streaming and direct downloading is often made possible by a set of intermediaries who provide services that facilitate the provision and consumption of cultural works. These intermediaries form a structured ecosystem that needs to be analyzed.
In this study, the supreme authority for the distribution and protection of intellectual property on internet (Hadopi) aims to describe the organization of one of these intermediaries, and to present estimates of the potential market value of the unlawful use it generates.
The intermediary in question is Wawacity. It is a referencing sites forum (the 3rd largest in France in terms of single visiters and page views).
The work presented in this study consisted first and foremost in collecting publicly available information on Wawacity. This collection was automated. It enabled us to understand the characteristics of the consumption generated by this forum. Secondly, the study presents a projection of this consumption on the reference prices of the legal market.
Attention should be paid to the meaning of the notion of "projecting illegal use onto the legal market". This is described in the introduction to the "Consumption projection" section of this document. The "Putting it into Perspective" section of the same document outlines the potential pitfalls in interpreting this notion.
The main conclusions to be drawn from this work concern the characteristics of consumption generated by Wawacity.
Wawacity lists over 500,000 files corresponding to some 50,000 different works. More than 50 million clicks have been made. The most represented works are films, series, ebooks and music (in terms of both number of works and files). However, in terms of usage (number of clicks), films, ebooks and series are the most clicked categories, with respectively 25.3%, 23.9% and 19.9% of all clicks.
As far as making a work available is concerned, although every user can potentially make a work available, in practice only 10 accounts are responsible for more than 80% of the works made available. These 10 accounts, which we'll summon "big uploaders", are responsible for 81% of the 500,000 files made available and 76% of the 50 million clicks recorded.
Finally, we learn from this work that the estimated consumption* of the 30 most-clicked films on Wawacity on the legal market amounts to €12.8 million. The big uploaders (top 10 accounts) are responsible for 92% of this estimate, i.e. 11.8 M€.
This amount represents 0.5% of the total budget of these 30 films (€2.5 billion). This percentage varies according to the budgets of the films concerned: it exceeds 1.5% for low-budget films and remains below 0.4% for big-budget films.
For 70 other randomly selected films, the estimate is €2.75 million. The share of big uploaders is more diffused, although still clearly in the majority (68%). The same disparities can be seen in the relative importance of film budgets: up to 10 times more for low-budget films than for high-budget films.
* This projection of consumption is a strict projection onto a similar legal market in terms of usage, but there is nothing to indicate that these practices are substitutable (a film consumed free of charge might not have been consumed if it had had to be paid for, and, conversely, its free availability might not only impact its consumption on VOD, but also hypothetical consumption in cinemas or on DVD). It is therefore impossible to draw any conclusions about the potential impact on the general economy of cinema.