School Teacher Will Sue HADOPI

A 54-year-old school teacher in France appeared to be one of the first users to be disconnected from the web under HADOPI legislation. However, he has no idea how to download illegal copies of copyrighted content, saying that he became the victim of Wi-Fi hacking.

The industry observers are tired to insist that the “three-strikes” legislation, which is quickly developed throughout the world, involves false accusations. In other words, there is probability that people who don’t download illegal content will find themselves cut off the web because the system is guilty until proven innocent.

So, the story with a teacher becomes one of the most predictable ones that the media have covered all year. A 54-year-old school teacher turned out to be disconnected from the Internet because his IP address was used by someone else to infringe copyright. The problem is that the teacher himself has never downloaded copyrighted content on the Internet. That’s why he’s planning to fight HADOPI, which only began issuing these notifications back in October of last year. According to the media reports, the teacher is even ready to take this issue to the European Justice court.

Meanwhile, the sad part of the issue is that the teacher is fighting HADOPI at great expense. Aside from having to fight the court charges, he’ll have to move from the countryside at his own expense if the problem be escalated to going to the European court.

Now the question is how this happened at the first place. Apparently, the teacher’s Wi-Fi connection was hacked. When he had received the second wrongful accusation, he took steps to secure the connection, but failed to do so, as the hackers still succeeded in breaking in to his Wi-Fi connection and his IP address was registered downloading the illegal copy of the movie “Iron Man 2”. In the meantime, the teacher is being accused of downloading that film though he has no idea how it is done.

The story came as no surprise, because with such a highly publicized new policy and outfit, Internet users were bound to cover their tracks by breaking in to someone else’s Wi-Fi connection in order to use their IP address to avoid detection. As the result, innocent citizens will get disconnected, while those responsible keep doing the same. It seems that the teacher won’t be the last target.