French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has said she plans to cut the power of France's anti-piracy body Hadopi, deeming the whole excercise a failure.
Since copyright enforcement shifted from the corporate to the public sector at a reported cost of 12 million Euros, Hadopi has been described as “unwieldy, uneconomic and ultimately ineffective” by Filippetti in an interview with French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur.
The comments come in stark contrast to research from the IFPI released earlier this year, which showed piracy in France had decreased by 26% in the first year since Hadopi was introduced in 2010.
Despite so far sending a million warning e-mails and 99,000 registered letters, Hadopi's pursuit has resulted in just 134 cases being examined for prosecution, said Filippetti – and zero cases have been escalated to the point where an Internet user has been disconnected.
The French government has now launched a consultation to re-examine Internet piracy.
In a separate interview, Pierre Lescure – head of the commission into the Future of Piracy – said he attaches “great importance” to the development of legal offers, and suggested that the temptations to piracy are too great for anyone to resist.
“The error of Hadopi was to focus on the penalty”, he told Le Nouvel Observateur. “If one starts from the penalty, it will fail”, he said, adding that the sanction of disconnection is, for now, unenforceable.
Source: The Register
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