French Copyright Enforcement Agency Can't Keep Up with Workload

The French agency tasked with enforcing the country's three-strike anti-piracy law is having a hard time keeping up with the number of emails and letters it has to send.

The French High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet (Hadopi) has to notify copyright offenders via electronic and regular mail three times before they face penalties.

With a nation of 65 million people and 18 million copyright infringement reports so far, Hadopi is swamped. According to Ars Technica, the agency has only been able to send 470,000 initial email warnings so far.

Around 20,000 of these were followed by second notifications sent via snail mail and ten users received their third and final warning.

The cases of people who receive three warnings are reviewed by a judge. No one has been disconnected from the Internet so far although this is likely to happen in the future.

According to a Hadopi spokesperson, the reason for the big difference between the number of complaints and sent warnings is the prototype system used at the moment.

The agency is working on developing a better system, but it will take some time to complete. It expects to have it in place by the end of this year.

Also, the 18 million complaints don't necessarily mean that there are 18 million copyright infringers. The same user could have been reported multiple times with different IP addresses by separate right holders. ISPs will have to check their access logs and match IP addresses to names before an actual number of offenders can be determined.

"We don't want to prosecute people. We just want to push people to change when, knowing it or not, they are committing piracy. So we're trying to give people the time to understand what they are doing and to change before prosecuting them," the Hadopi spokesperson said.