Anti-Piracy Work Resulted In 14 Cases
About two years ago, in 2010, a tool to fight digital piracy was created in France. The organization was called Hadopi. It was established to receive requests from right holders for takedowns of French IP addresses trying to download file with illegally obtained media via P2P.
According to the data presented by Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, the President of the Commission for Rights Protection (part of the Hadopi agency), for the period of almost two years, among 3 million IPs registered by Hadopi 1.15 million were found pirating data. These people were sent a letter notifying them about their infringement. Six percent of them communicated back to discuss the matter. The second wave of warning letters counted 102,854 cases, among which 24 percent responded. From these only 304 received the third warning. This time 75% interacted with the committee. As a result of these steps, on July 1, only 14 offenders of the law had a case filed with the French court, the legal measure Hadopi is allowed to use if the third warning is ignored. Still, none of them have been taken to the trial yet.
Even though the President of the Commission for Rights Protection considers these to be good results, in 2012 the existence of the committee is put under question. The new President of France, François Hollande, wants to replace Hadopi with something else. Upon taking the post, he has appointed a new French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, who seemed to be intended on closing Hadopi. In August, she pointed out that this organization costs a lot: "In financial terms, [spending] €12 million (which is about $14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails."
In general, if we believe the numbers, the project proved effective in teaching French people about legal matters of data spreading over the Internet. And according to Mireille Imbert-Quaretta's words that was the actual idea behind the project.
