Saving The French Cinema
France’s Minister for Culture, Françoise Nyssen, is working to ensure that measures are taken to blacklist websites that engage in piracy affecting French cinema. As you may remember from our previous article, GOING UP IN SMOKE, the cinema is possibly France’s most cherished export (behind the baguette of course) which may explain why Nyssen is so dead-set on taking care of this “scourge” once and for all.
She has stated that “We must impose the same financial obligations on these players as those traditionally established in France, and we must impose a quota of European works on video on demand platforms” and has vowed to create regulation to aid in the fight against piracy and, effectively, put France at the head of the spear. She has described piracy as “an absolute scourge,” and that it destroys the “worth, power and duty of dissent” of France.
“I hope that ‘blacklists’ will be established by HADOPI [Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits d’auteur sur Internet (Supreme Authority for the Distribution and Protection of Intellectual Property on the Internet)], to allow advertisers, payment services or search engines to recognise illegal sites and to stop their dealings with them,” she said.
According to Nyssen, most of the government’s power in combatting piracy is being used ineffectively by focusing on peer-to-peer downloads, while nearly 80% is perpetrated by streaming or direct download.“The fight against piracy is one of the great challenges of the century for cinema. France will be on the front line in supporting it,” she declared.
A major financier of French and European cinema (with €500 million in direct investment), The Canal + Group has received the Minister’s proposals with open arms as it also holds a place at the forefront of the piracy war. In a statement by the company, they hope to “By tackling illegal streaming and downloading, placing the priority directly on the fight against pirate sites and their mirror sites in a dynamic way, creating the conditions for a rapid and lasting suppression of the sites concerned in connection with the judiciary, this plan shows an encouraging ambition and a pragmatic adaptation of certain good practices that have proven effective abroad.”
We hope you've enjoyed learning about how the French government, especially, Françoise Nyssen is working to Saving the French Cinema. Do you think the efforts will be successful, or is piracy an inevitable byproduct of the digital age? Let us know what you think below!