By Pierre COUVEINHES
By Jean-Noël TRONC
The culture and entertainment business employs more than 14.000.000 persons in France with annual sales amounting to approximately €860 billion, the equivalent of 7% of the GDP of the 27 EU member states. Europe must draw profit from this sector’s competitive edge and potential for growth. It must play up its cultural treasures, which this sector conveys worldwide. It must, therefore, help develop a strong culture and entertainment industry, if it wants to avoid becoming a mere consumer of works produced and distributed by sources outside the EU. For this purpose, it must implement a genuine strategy for supporting European champions in this business and thus take issue with the “digital exception” that it has let prevail and that mainly benefits giants from outside the EU in entertainment and culture.
By Laurence FRANCESCHINI
Directrice générale des Médias et des Industries culturelles, ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
Technological trends for more than twenty years now have considerably affected the culture and entertainment industries. They threaten a longstanding equilibrium and have an enormous impact on the uses to which consumers put cultural goods and services and, too, on the forms for creating and transmitting the latter. This has deeply changed the relations the authors of these products have with the public, editors and producers. These changes have rattled business models in the music, book and audiovisual industries as well as in cinema, video games and the printed press. Digital developments turn users into active agents by giving them possibilities for creating and sharing cultural goods and services.
By Jean BERBINAU
Ingénieur général des Mines (origine Telecom - en retraite). Membre du Collège de la Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet (HADOPI). Ancien Secrétaire Général de l’Autorité de Régulation des Mesures Techniques (ARMT)
Under the full brunt of the digital tsunami, the culture and entertainment business imagined surviving in a sheltered position by raising protective barriers based on techniques that were expected to be nigh perfectly efficient for upholding their property rights. They now have to reach an equilibrium with the Internet, a balance between, on the one hand, the gains expected from setting prices as a function of quality (so as to come as close as possible to an economic optimum given both the costs of setting up protective barriers and their social acceptability) and, on the other hand, the potential losses resulting from the persistence of “easy uses” that should be assessed by taking into account all forms of partial compensation (mainly through fees for private copies). Instead of dreaming of a technique that would “mirror the law”, these operators will very likely decide to set the limits of “technical closure” inside the legal bounds of their property rights.
By Anne-Élisabeth CRÉDEVILLE
Vous, prevalent till a recent date in French usage, is now very frequently replaced with tu, a replacement that has gradually gained ground, especially since the events of May 1968. The Internet, social networks and globalization are all major contributing factors to this trend. As a consequence, the meanings of these second-person pronouns are changing, unless the part of society relatively outside the Internet stops accepting dom ination by the Web and takes back the parcel of humanity encoded in traditional usage.
By Philippe LEVRIER
Ancien élève de l’Ecole Polytechnique (X 68), Ancien membre du Conseil supérieur de l’Audiovisuel
Will television dissolve in the Internet, as several omens portend? Thanks to high-speed connections and digital compression, images are flooding the Web. Screens, individual and portable, are proliferating. Will Web television deal the fatal blow to the old audiovisual system? The answer is not evident. Given its robust nature, the old model of television is putting up resistance, while new practices are advancing slowly. The growth of Web TV has run up against obstacles. What changes will the Web usher in: a revolution in televisual services? or a mutation of TV sets? Who is taking part in this business battle?
By Patrice MARTIN-LALANDE
Député du Loir-et-Cher, coprésident du groupe d’études « Internet et société numérique » à l’Assemblée nationale, auteur d’un rapport remis au Premier ministre sur le régime juridique du jeu vidéo
Though considered one of the most creative lands in the sector of video games, France has, in recent years, lost half of the 10.000 jobs in this business! This paradox is unacceptable. We cannot resign ourselves to this massive job loss in a thriving mar- ket where the country has proven its outstanding creativity! We must react immediately to the stiff competition from other coun- tries now that a new hand is being dealt in the video gaming business owing to dematerialization and mobility. The author, whom the Prime Minister’s office has asked to make proposals about a legal framework for video games, presents an argument for updating French and EU policies for subsidizing this busi- ness, in particular, by modernizing a tax credit for this sector.
By Jacques TOUBON
Given the exponential increase in the sale of tablets, smart phones and e-book readers, digital books are making up an ever larger share of the total book market: about 20% in the United States. The trend is unfolding more slowly in France. French policy seeks to promote cultural diversity by favoring, through a regulation of this market, competition between companies that are competitive. Among the concrete measures taken for printed and digital books are the principle of allowing publishers to set sale prices and the application of the same reduced VAT rate to both sorts of books. This is the policy that France is backing at the EU level.
By Godefroy DANG NGUYEN
Professeur et directeur scientifique adjoint à Télécom Bretagne, Marsouin
Sylvain DEJEAN
Docteur en Économie de l’Université de Pau et coordinateur du GIS Marsouin, Télécom Bretagne, CREM (Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management)
and Thierry PÉNARD
Professeur d’Économie à l’Université de Rennes 1 et chercheur au CREM (Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management), Marsouin
The omnipresence of “free” services on the Internet is exciting, a source of both pleasure and fear for companies. For firms, “you don’t make (much) money on the Web”, apart from a few exceptions; and for individuals, there is probably a hidden price, namely the loss of anonymity and the trespassing of the private sphere. The Internet has put forth the “free” business model to capture customers, but it has also shown its capacity for a collective communication and production of knowledge of a good quality, thus revealing how strongly human beings are inclined to cooperate. Revealed on such a scale, this spirit of cooperation comes as a surprise given the increasing individualization of social trajectories.
By Yves LE MOUËL
Internet service-providers play a leading role in shaping the ecosystem of digital culture and leisure activities in France. They even play two roles since they are both indispensable middlemen between creators and the public, and major partners in the business model for financing and promoting “works of culture”. Operators in telecommunications thus have an interest in sustaining the growth of the market for digital culture and entertainment. They want to take part in designing the new framework for the French “cultural exception” by cooperating with all other stakeholders on their common interests and for the purpose of developing creations made in France.
By David EL SAYEGH
After ten years of technological, economic and legal upheaval, the entertainment industry — in particular, the music business — must prove capable of sustaining new patterns of growth. The major issue for the French music industry in this deeply changing context is to maintain the diversity and momentum of its production, since these are its DNA. At present, 60% of the sales of recorded music are of works produced in France; and 30% of the income of producers derives from the sale of digital forms of music. Furthermore, 51% of music purchases are made on the Internet, a statistic that places the music business far ahead of other entertainment industries, with an average of merely 8% of purchases via the Internet. To win the battle of diversity: an effective system must be set up to protect intellectual property rights on the Internet; a wider and more qualitative exposure must be developed to music of all sorts on television and radio; and arrangements must be made for subsidizing local sources of production, which are menaced during this period of transition.
By Alain BENSOUSSAN, Éric BARBRY et Avocats – Alain Bensoussan Avocats – Lexing
Avocats – Alain Bensoussan Avocats – Lexing
The Internet of things comes out of a merging of the material and digital worlds. Entering this new dimension leads to several legal questions about the status and identity of connected devices, about the liability of an object or entailed by it, about the control and governance of the Object Name System (ONS), etc. Besides the need to rethink our usual concepts about, for instance, the rights related to personal data or privacy, questions also crop up about the legal framework for the new rights that will be created: the right to silence microchips, the right to be invisible (to disappear) and the portability of data. If regulations prove necessary, they should not impede the development of the Internet of things. The decision comes down to choosing between a legal framework “of the Internet of things”, fraught with rules and regulations, or “for the Internet of things”, based on experimentation and a control not of the objects themselves but of how they are used.
By Lieutenant-Colonel Éric FREYSSINET
Observations over the past ten years of cybercriminality and the misuses of digital technology have shown that illegal activities for appropriating funds or information are no longer restricted to the cyberuniverse’s margins. As the Internet of things becomes a field of human activity, this sort of risk must enter into account, even more so since the consequences are hard to evaluate given the magnitude of the change: the number of devices and networks that will be interacting, and the new uses that will emerge. Several axes of research on security must be pursued, including those that will help us profit from this new technology in order to improve security.
By Hervé RANNOU
ITEMS International
The global market for radio frequency identification tags amounted to $7,7 billion in 2012 and might rise to $27 billion by 2023. The big retail chains that heralded the Internet of things are now rather cautious. The growth of RFID has taken a new turn, toward biometrics, the management of logistics, the fight against fraud and the “smart city”: traffic control in urban areas, instruments for measuring the quality of the air, smart devices, smart buildings, etc. These new developments are full of promise…
By Olivier ROUXEL
Chargé de mission à la Direction générale de la Compétitivité, de l’Industrie et des Services (DGCIS), ministère du Redressement productif
With the ambition of making objects “dialog” with each other and with human beings, and given the prospects of an ever more densely interconnected world, the Internet of things is loaded with technological, scientific, social, regulatory and political issues. It claims to be the driving force for transforming the activities of companies, individuals and institutions. Europe must make its voice heard in discussions about the genesis of this new world, lest we be forced to adopt solutions worked out elsewhere. It has to build an acceptable, governable and profitable Internet of things. France has been deeply involved in “mediatizing” this concept, and has a leading role to play in research in this field and in rallying Europeans around its efforts for applying the Internet of things to the retail business.
By Samuel ROPERT
The Internet and telecommunication networks (in particular, cell phones) are now being used not only by human beings, both private persons and professionals. Connections to the Internet are now being made not only via terminals (computers, portable telephones and, now, the tablets sold in retail chain stores) but also through the objects and machines used in everyday life. The latter, usually called M2M (machine to machine), represent a strongly growing market: more than 100 million M2M SIM cards (or their equivalents) were already circulating worldwide in 2011. These mass applications in several sectors have profited from the standards of compliance imposed by regulatory authorities (emergency call numbers in automobiles, deregulation of the electricity market, etc.) and from the improvement of productivity thanks to M2M. This strong growth has whetted the appetite of the telecommunication industry, which sees it as a way to stimulate its own growth even as its usual activities in developed countries are slowing down.
By Jean-Pierre DARDAYROL
Ingénieur général des Mines
Claudine DUCHESNE
Contrôleur général Économique et Financier
and Loïc de LA COCHETIÈRE
Chargé de mission
The CGEIET (Conseil Général de l’Économie, de l’Industrie, de l’Énergie et des Technologies) has had an advisory assignment about the technology of the Internet of things in transborder logistics. This foreword-looking study made four observations. First of all, the Internet of things is a motivating and credible prospect. Secondly, a midor long term trend is under way for taking advantage of of the Internet of things; its driving force is business economics and security in the broadest sense of the word. Thirdly, generalizing the Internet of things depends on rationales specific to each stakeholder in a context with a plurality of standards, techniques, architectures and operators. Finally, mass uses of the Internet of things entail finding solutions to several nontechnological problems, mainly having to do with the protection of privacy and economic intelligence.
By Gabriel KÉPÉKLIAN
Responsable Recherche et Développement chez Atos Intégration
Imagine tomorrow: you will sit in your living room printing the parts of a drone on your 3D printer, you will assemble the drone, including the motor, a few sensors and an open-source hardware “shield» that uses the most recent multicore video HD processor; and you will finish by loading its code, also open source. In fact, you need not imagine: all this already exists, and the drone can be guided by a cell phone. The odds are good that no one has even noticed — who knows that your drone exists? The predicted magnitude of the Web of objects is so large that no economic stakeholder can remain indifferent. A war is being waged; the parties to it are coming out in public, but their motives are not always easy to penetrate. In any case, the “old” objects of everyday life are being enhanced to become devices in this new world. And new objects are coming into being, designed, from the start, to be intrinsically and materially, first-class devices hooked up to the Internet of things. To have a foothold in this market, companies must invest and stake out positions. The same holds for our education system.
By Yann LE ROCH
Ingénieur agronome de formation. Actuellement, en préparation d’une thèse de doctorat au Centre de Gestion scientifique de l’Ecole des Mines de Paris
et Éric BALLOT
Professeur au Centre de Gestion scientifique de Mines ParisTech
The Internet of things, which endows each object with an identity or even a degree of autonomy, can serve as a basis for reorganizing logistics. For this purpose, new business models are needed to convert technological proposals into genuine logistical innovations for both service-providers and shippers. A few guidelines for this innovation are proposed…
