The police claimed Prevost had used “U-Torrent or Torrent, that must be it,” he recalled.
“[Again] I gave a statement saying that I had not installed or downloaded anything,” he told PCInpact. “After those steps, I thought to myself: ‘I’m all set, I’m OK.’ Even the policeman told me, ‘This is just music files, there’s nothing really serious. This should be OK.’ What followed was nonsense. I thought I was OK. [But then] I found myself in court.”
Prevost added that he defended himself without a lawyer because he thought that his cooperation and explanation of the details would absolve him.
“Anyway, I’m honest, and I recognized that I was in possession of [these files],” he said. “After that, they took into account that I had no criminal history, and so they reduced the fine. They asked for €300 and it was reduced to €150. All in all, I can just tell myself that this is less.”
When the site asked him if it was a fair end to this story, he simply said that he “wanted it to end.”
“I will not be harassed by the Hadopi group for such things any more,” he added. “I think they wanted to make an example of me. Well, it fell to me. This isn’t serious. We have to take it like that.”
Hadopi still has 13 cases pending
Still, Prevost could have faced a fine of up to €1,500 ($1,940) and had his Internet access cut off for a month, but the prosecutor only requested a fine of €300.
The head of Hadopi, Marie-Françoise Marais, told (Google Translate) the man’s hometown newspaper Le Pays (The Country) that because so few cases have actually been brought forward, Hadopi has “[been] a mission of education, not of repression.”
The Prevost case appears to have bolstered the argument that Hadopi isn’t going after large-scale pirates, but rather punishing those who are technologically ignorant.
“If the defendant was someone who was downloading a significant amount of content, he would have taken a few minutes to anonymize his Internet connection—in essence, he is being fined for not being a large-scale, tech-savvy downloader,” wrote Joe McNamee of European Digital Rights, in an e-mail to Ars. “The penalties imposed by Hadopi are almost designed to be as disproportionate and unfair as possible.”