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tistics about its crawling activities, the effective number oftitles that have been cleared successfully, and the illegalhosting sites with the best and the worst track records ofcompliance.In a brochure issued by the PA, takedown rates were documentedby country, with compliance rates of over 90%for territories and countries such as Hong Kong, Gibraltar,and Cyprus and significant levels for countries such as Russia(71.69%), China (65.75%), and Ukraine (60.69%).FranceIn 2013, the French publishers association, Syndicat Nationalde l'Èdition (SNE) decided to license and adapt theUK infringement portal for their French members. (Actualitté,August 5, 2013)This pragmatic approach hints at a broader recent policychange, as it contradicts an earlier attitude that focusedmuch more on lobbying the French government to imposestricter legislation rather than promote more practical actions.This move, however, is in line with the Lescure report,a white paper commissioned by the government and publishedin the spring of 2013, proposing even to abolishearlier strict legislation - the Hadopi law - in favor of a “moregradual approach” (Rapport Lescure, summarized in LeMonde, May 13, 2013).Hadopi, the High Authority for the Diffusion of Works and theProtection of Rights on the Internet (Haute Autorité pour ladiffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet)was formed by a law implemented in 2010. Its goal was topromote and encourage legal offers to fight infringement.One of the main actions of the authority is to send warningsto consumers who are infringing copyright law. In acontroversial “three strikes” approach, a user can ultimatelybe banned from accessing the Internet for a certain periodafter being found guilty three times.In January 2012, Hadopi released a study arguing that thepercentage of French consumers who admit to havingdownloaded digital content illegally had dropped fromover 49% to just 29% for the six months prior to their survey,data that illustrate the impact of the authority’s actions(, eBouqin, January 24, 2012). Music (at 57%) andvideos (at 48%) were most popular; books interested only29% of the infringing audience, a scale that might also hintat the limited interest that ebooks have among the generalFrench audience. Overall, Hadopi is not strongly supportedby the book publishing community.Fifty-six of the infringements investigated under Hadopiwere by men and 42 by women, with those from 15 to 24years of age by far the most active (with 70% admittingillegal downloads).Research on ebook piracy in France is carried out withyearly reports by Le Motif, an organization sponsored bythe Ile-de-France region. Its ambition is to provide an observatoryfor the “book in the region,” which includes anannual survey on ebooks, both legal and illegal.In an update, published in March 2012 and includingmostly 2011 data, Le Motif documented a continuous risein available illegal ebook titles —from 4,000 to 6,000 in2009 to between 11,000 and 14,000 at the time of thestudy. A remarkable detail regarding France is the share ofebooks from BD (bande desinnée, or comics, graphic novels,and manga), which currently accounts for 8,000 to10,000 of the illegally available works (Ebookz 3, Etude surl’offre numérique illegal des livres français sur Internet en2011, 3e année).The study argues that, based on the presence of 3,000 to4,000 “easily available trade titles” at illegal sites, just 1%of legal print offerings has been effectively pirated, versusaround 25% of the overall 35,000 to 40,000 available BDtitles. Remarkably, only 44 of the singled-out BD bestsellersof a panel from 2010 to 2011 were available for illegaldownload, of which 58% had no legal digital edition onthe market. Manga has been by far the most popular subsegment.The authors of the Motif study underline thehigh quality of many of the pirated BD titles, with entireteams working on their digitization, resulting in files thataverage around 30 MB. 2At that time, the French national syndicate of book publishers(SNE) partnered with nine publishers of BD (Dargaud,Dargaud-Lombard, Dupuis, Lucy Comics, la Sefam, GuyDelcourt Productions, MC Productions, Glénate, and Audie)to fight illegal distribution via a specialized popular Usenetforum, altbinaries.bd.french. This effort began in 2008, butas of the writing of this report, no final judgment has beengiven.2. It must be noted that these ratios may have changed significantly in the meantime, as the offer of legal digital of books of all genres had stronglyincreased as of mid-2012.100 The Global eBook Report