Believe it or not it’s been nine months since the French 3 strike Hadopi law has started being enforced against unsuspecting French Internet users in the hopes of cracking down on online file sharing particularly in regards to piracy of music and films. Time sure flies when you’re cracking down. A couple days ago in Paris Hadopi revealed their preliminary numbers in the hopes of showing how efficient they have been so far since their repressive campaign began.

While to date the effectiveness of the initial warning emails being sent out to alleged file-sharers have yet to be proven successful, one thing for sure is that since October 2010 this so called French Internet “authority” have definitely been having a field day testing out the full gamut of “powers” that they’ve been bestowed with.

As of July 2011 the five main groups who have been authorized to control Internet users and communicate on behalf of Hadopi said their preliminary figures revealed over 18 million detections of so called copyright infractions by French file-sharers. However, as these unscrupulous opportunistic companies seek yet more money and powers from the French government, they claim that out of these 18 million evil pirates, they could only go after 1 million of them. This represents a meager 5% and apparently they were selected completely at random which also makes no sense to me. Presumably one would logically think of going after the larger, more prevalent file-sharers first, the ones consistently accounting for the greatest amount of upload transit of pirated materials from their connections. Ridiculous I know, anyways, they went on to explain that out of these randomly selected million IPs to date they were only able get the identity of 900,000 people associated with those suspected addresses.

With these alleged pirates identities, the 3 strike warning and enforcement process could begin. They say that in the first 9 months they managed to send out 470,000 initial warning emails. The second strike, within a six month period of the first email warning, resulted in another 20,000 emails being sent out, this time coupled with registered letters sent via the postal service. However cases where the individual was actually pursued and escalated to the courts were said to be only about ten during that period. If convicted one runs the risk of fines upwards of 1500 Euros and having their Internet access cut off, although to date I don’t think anyone has been successfully prosecuted.

From a technical perspective, Hadopi is currently only able to track P2P traffic by themselves joining into the P2P pools which openly communicate peers IP’s to other clients in the network, which means that all other protocols and direct transfers remain un-policed.

So basically as of now we’re looking at roughly 10 individuals being pursued in justice out of an alleged 18 million. That’s a staggering 0.0000005 %, and they’re hoping that this will intimidate and scare everyone else in France from downloading music and movies via P2P? That’s an interesting tactic to say the least. So far this has epic failure written all over it and I can’t say I’m particularly saddened or surprised.