France's 'three strikes' law goes into action

This week the controversial French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi went live. The Hadopi law was proposed by the Sarkozy government and passed last year. Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out 10.000's of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to ISP's, and this will increase to over a million in a few weeks. The ISPs have to hand over the identities of the associated accounts to the authorities within a week, or face a fine of 1500 euros per unidentified IP-address.
Under the French Hadopi law, alleged copyright infringers will be tracked down systematically in an attempt to decrease copyright piracy. Alleged offenders shall be identified by their Internet providers and reported to a judge once they have received three warnings. A judge will then review the case and hand down any one of a range of penalties, from fines through to disconnecting the Internet connection of the infringer. The scope of the operation is enormous. The copyright holders will start out with 10,000 IP-addresses per day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day.
All the major French ISPs are obliged to cooperate with this identification process. The first 'victims' are expected to be disconnected or fined within a few months.