The Government is reflecting on the followup to

The Constitutional Council just invalidate the punitive part of the Hadopi law. He found that the Internet access was a fundamental right and that his suspension, even temporary, may not be the result of an administrative decision. The Government is reflecting on the follow-up to. Ironically, it was well at the end of a trial before a jury that Jammie Thomas-Basset has recently was fined to Minneapolis more of $ 1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs!

In the cultural industries, as for the media, the Internet may disrupt the distribution of income between the different actors and makes obsolete the traditional economic models. The laws, regulations, strategies of artists and distributors should be reviewed. For Parliament, the situation is very confusing because the consequences of the illegal downloading and its economy are poorly understood.

There is no doubt about the fact that the record industry revenues declined substantially since 2000, though download networks grew exponentially. Although their advocates insist on the fact that these networks have legal applications, the most popular of them are built expressly to make more difficult the detection of illegal downloads and found on their sites of instructions to limit the risks.

That said, it is very difficult to measure the real impact of illegal downloading on the sales of discs Econometrics that are coupled to the task have divergent estimates, ranging from no effect to a substantive effect. In any case, we can be sure that any downloaded music illegally would not have been bought: a significant proportion is never heard! It is therefore impossible to say with certainty that the decline in CD sales is due to the rise of the download, as the number of updated titles on the market has increased substantially since the year 2000.

Despite this uncertainty, it is a political imperative to find a legal framework in which not only music and movies are widely disseminated, but also where the establishment is paid. Some insist on the possibility of the loss of income from the sale of recorded music by the sale of "complementary": posters, T-shirts, and especially concerts. These revenues are certainly welcome, but by not only paying a portion of the service rendered to the public, they provide insufficient incentives to artistic creation.

Another solution is to tax electronic equipment that can be used to listen to music and to redistribute the tax, for example through a society of authors, artists. This procedure has the disadvantage to pay small consumers as large and it needs to estimate the popularity of different artists to determine the sharing of revenues from this tax.

A comprehensive solution to the problem will have to rely on these methods that seek to mitigate the consequences of the illegal downloading. This will not be sufficient and some repression of illegal downloading is probably also necessary. It is not, in itself, of ethical issue: it is of an illegal activity. But it is very difficult to implement effective, technically and politically. It is not easy to know what link in the chain must be addressed. The Hadopi law penalizing people who download music on their computers, but it might be more effective to address those who provide content, or, as the Swedish authorities come to, to the managers of the networks. The American industry has decided to try to persuade ISPs to limit the illegal downloading.

With an issue of such importance and such difficult, the Hadopi Act have not closed debate even if it had been approved by the Constitutional Council. There is no perfect solution. To find a track satisfactory, it will be necessary to rely on the range of incentives and repressive instruments that can be deployed for both artists and disseminate their works to the greatest number. Lot of work, imagination and experimentation will be needed to get there.