Vivendi

Through its presence in both the content and networks areas, Vivendi explores all technical, regulatory, and economic solutions from a twofold perspective: fundamentally defending intellectual property rights and meeting the expectations of the general public in the age of the Internet and mobility.

To promote respect for intellectual property, the group:

• is involved in regulatory matters: Vivendi supports all initiatives that tend to encourage consumers to choose legal usages and increasingly consider piracy as a needless risk;
• leverages its content;
• offers innovative technical solutions such as filtering – experiments are underway in Europe and the United States and are gaining pertinence as a means of decreasing the phenomenon of massive illegal downloading.

The business units take stringent measures and implement innovative initiatives to ensure the respect of intellectual property rights related to content.

For example, to guarantee full security of its content, STUDIOCANAL has adopted several protective measures, particularly during promotional activities for its films. These measures include a reduction in the number of promotional DVDs distributed prior to release, the use of lower-quality copies for communication purposes, and also distribution of fully identifiable DVDs and 35-mm copies. A watermarking (digital tattooing) process was implemented in order to ensure total traceability. Agreements have also taken place with Internet watch companies that monitor and analyze the film distributors on pirate networks.

These actions are accompanied by a major awareness-raising campaign in order to instill a sense of responsibility along the entire production chain. The precautions taken to preserve the integrity of STUDIOCANAL products are described in a charter accessible to employees.

STUDIOCANAL is also considering other technical solutions that could increase the effectiveness of the fight against piracy – in particular fingerprinting, which would make it possible to counter the uploading of specific content to video sharing platforms (such as Dailymotion and YouTube), and spoofing (interfering with pirates’ activities by sending mass decoy files).