In a statement of bravado that bordered on delusion, the president of French film and production company Gaumont announced that, "between the 15th of May and the 15th of December 2011, not a single French film was downloaded on the Web," due to France's strict anti-piracy law Hadopi. In Gaumont’s financial report (PDF) released this month, Gaumont president Nicolas Seydoux (who also leads France’s ALPA, an association against audiovisual piracy) praised Hadopi and other organizations for significantly reducing all kinds of digital piracy in the second half of 2011.

The statement may not be (read: it's probably not) entirely true. As French site Numerama points out, Seydoux preceeds that proclamation by saying that the ALPA detected 110 million incidents of audiovisual piracy and sent 8.7 million notices to Hadopi, the government office that deals with the law of the same name. "We can hardly believe that in this volume not a single incident involves the pirating of French films," Numerama declared. According to the ALPA and Gaumont, illegal downloads of movies (presumably only international films) saw a 50 percent reduction in the last year.

In his statement, Seydoux said that illegal movie streaming sites have been harder to stifle. He did applaud the delisting of several infringing sites, as well as the arrest and imprisonment of three illegal streaming site administrators and one illegal supplier of movies before their release date.

While Seydoux’s statement sounds unbelievable, his positivity about Hadopi’s success might have a political tinge. France’s new president, François Hollande, has been cool to the anti-piracy law, which scans P2P sites and punishes copyright infringers in the country. And in his statement, Seydoux calls piracy, "a subject on which Francois Hollande has to date not definitely settled."

Studies in 2010 suggested that piracy in France was more frequent after the law passed. Two years later while piracy was less frequent, music sales were reportedly down despite the tight monitoring of P2P networks. With results that vague, industry officials may be eager to declare improbable success in order to make continuation of the law more politically palatable.