Flower Power
Earlier this year in March the French Minister of Culture,
Fleur Pellerin, presented a new framework for dealing with online piracy and
signed an anti-piracy charter known as ‘charter of good practices in advertising for
protection of copyright and related rights’ setting out best practices in
relation to advertising on pirate sites.
The campaign against the pirate sites continues as
the Minister launched a monitoring committee of best practices in the area of
online payment methods, on September 10, as the next tool in
the government’s toolbox to fight piracy (building on recommendations made in the
report submitted to the government in May 2014 by Mireille Imbert-Quaretta (a member of HADOPI), itself a follow-up to the Lescure report from May 2013.
Adopting the “follow-the-money” approach espoused by
the Imbert-Quaretta report, the committee is to work with a group representing
payment actors including MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe andthe French Banking
Federation on the one hand and organizations representing rights holders on the other hand. These two groups
will meet at least twice a year to identify, on the basis of specific criteria,
sites that are unlawful, and consider ways to cut their funding as well as,
where appropriate, blocking payments thereto. Since the approach is
non-binding, the committee’s success will depend largely on the payment actors'
willingness to play ball. The real challenge for the committee is the sheer size
of the problem. The data suggest that there are over 13 million pirate
sites users in France.
The Ministry of Culture has indicated that
it wants to push this initiative at the European level, thereby giving it an
international dimension.
Link to Advertising Charter: here
Link to Imbert-Quaretta report from May 2014: here
Link to Pierre Lescure report from May 2013: here
By way of clarification, the committee is not actually drawing up a charter. It will meet regularly and monitor the situation and propose various recommendations and solutions.
ReplyDeleteAlso, for greater context, this initiative targets primarily streaming and direct downloading sites that take direct payment from users (for faster streaming, premium accounts, etc.). Peer-to-peer file sharing falls under the remit of HADOPI and its graduated response regime.