French illegal movie downloads almost equal box office sales

Written on 8th August 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The French are quite of fond of torrents, shows a study of the leading French anti-piracy association. Every day, 450,000 illegal downloads of recent films find their way to computers in France. This puts illegal pirate copies close to the level of legitimate box-office sales.

The study of the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA) focuses on the 100 most sought-after foreign and French film downloads from November 2007 to June 2008. This made up for 90 percent of the total traffic. ALPA scrutinized Internet traffic originating from France to foreign networks permitting illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading.

The director of ALPA Frederic Delacroix admitted he was surprised by the results: “We did not expect such numbers. We are facing a major phenomenon that can endanger the film industry and (other) audiovisual industries.”

To makes things worse, even the study was pirated. It wasn’t supposed to be published officially till September. How ironic is that?