This paper uses European cinema as a case study for analyzing how, in the networked communication characteristic of 21st-century information societies, the user adopts the role of a distributor of cultural works, resulting in a wider and more diversified range of available content – particularly in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks and file sharing sites over the Internet. Nonetheless, results of an online survey carried out on Portuguese Internet users suggest that the increase in the availability of European cinema combined with the free access to films does not translate in a higher frequency for the consumption of European productions. While, on the one hand, our empirical research confirms the existence of a "long tail" for European cinema in terms of offer over file sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, the data concerning the popularity of EU film productions within the respondents to our online survey seem to indicate that it is not enough to make available online each one of the hundreds of new titles released every year in the EU for the interest and attention consecrated by Internet users to these films to suddenly rise when compared to Hollywood blockbusters. Traditional impediments to the promotion and dissemination of European cinema remain unresolved in the online era. As examples, we can cite the linguistic fragmentation within the 28 member states of the EU, a lack of online tools for the aggregation, search and automatic recommendation of European films, the disparities in marketing budgets between EU and Hollywood film productions as well as the difficulties in pan-European licensing. Hence the need to question the defense of a policy model for European audiovisual culture strongly marked by a double subordination to Hollywood's agenda based both on a imitation of the Blockbuster formula - "tentpole" films with extremely high budgets exclusively funded by private sources - and in the fight against non-commercial file sharing.

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cinema, p2p, cinema europeu, pirataria, partilha de ficheiros, copyright, direito de autor