After 3 Years: French Authority Hadopi Keeps Proving Its Uselessness

After three years of existence, Hadopi French authority in charge with the infamous three-strikes gradual response system, has succeeded in proving nothing but a large waste of public money.

To mark its 3-year anniversary, Hadopi has issued its activity report which shows that, to the day, it has succeeded in ordering 1 sole Internet disconnection and, on the other hand, it has experienced large bureaucratic problems and issues with identifying subscribers.

Hadopi has sent a total of 1.912 million notifications to French Internet subscribers as strike one, 186 153 follow-up letters as strike 2 and has caused 1 disconnection as strike 3.

Only for 2013, Hapodi costs the French taxpayers 5.4 million Euro, large part of it spent to answer subscribers who make request regarding the name of the works for which they receive the notification. As the Ministry of Culture refused to allow for the names of the works to be included in the notification, the law stipulates Hadopi has to answer to the subscribers upon request. Therefore, in 2012-2013, there were 73210 contacts by phone or email with Internet subscribers out of which 81.73% were related to the content of the notification.

Hadopi believes that a modification of the legislation in this sense would be beneficial and would not affect the confidentiality of the communication if the receiver is the owner of the subscription.

Moreover, to contact subscribers, Hadopi has to go via Internet ISPs. The initial amount of the first notifications was thus reduced to 7.718 million as, apparently, there were multiple allegations against the same subscriber. The report says that 88% of these allegations were successfully matched against named subscribers.

Following the 186 453 letters sent for strike 2, there were 663 cases for which Hadopi was to decide whether to submit them to the court which resulted in 51 submissions to the courts for penalties. Most of these appear to have incurred a fine of between 35 and 450 Euro. Only one got a 15-day disconnection penalty.

Furthermore, Hadopi had other further expenses with the so-called “educational” program which involves taking the message into schools and educational establishments.

So, not only the system has proven inefficient for the declared purpose of cutting down illegal sharing of copyrighted works, but it also triggers high expenses from the public money.

The French government intends to incorporate Hadopi within the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) which might cut down some expenses but which does not entirely eliminate the system.

Hadopi: a blunt example of public money waste (only in French,10.10.2013)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/27203-hadopi-un-exemple-flagrant-de-g…

Hadopi turns three – bon anniversaire? (14.10.2013)
http://www.iptegrity.com/index.php/france/908-hadopi-turns-three-bon-a…

HADOPI annual report for 2012-2013
http://www.hadopi.fr/sites/default/files/page/pdf/HADOPI_RapportAnnuel…

EDRi-gram: The French three strikes system gave up on Internet disconnection (17.03.2013)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number11.14/french-3-strikes-without-disc…