A 40-year-old Frenchman living in rural eastern France has become the first person ordered to pay a fine under France’s controversial anti-piracy three-strikes law known as Hadopi.

On Thursday, a judge ruled that Alain Prevost (Google Translate) must pay €150 ($194) for failing to secure his Internet (presumably WiFi) connection and for ignoring the three warnings sent by the Hadopi agency. He has become the first person to be convicted under Hadopi; his is the first of 14 cases brought against French Internet users who reach the third strike.

Since the election of François Hollande as president in June 2012, Hadopi has been under fire (even if the initiative began under his predecessor). In August, the new French minister of culture indicated that Hadopi would likely get shut down.

Jérémie Zimmerman, of the French digital rights group La Quadrature du Net condemned this verdict, in an e-mail sent to Ars.

"This is pure harassment and intimidation of this poor chap who doesn't even know what happened to him, and shows the absurdity of the whole scheme," he wrote. "Actually, Hadopi cases are completely empty of any evidence, with only IP addresses collected by private companies that no judge could ever accept as valid."

Honesty is the best policy?

However, in a strange twist of facts, Prevost was not even guilty of downloading. Instead, it was his soon-to-be ex-wife, who was in attendance in court. She even admitted under oath that she downloaded the two Rihanna songs in question.

According to French media reports, the man, described as a local artisan, told the court he was "totally incapable of downloading anything." However, because he was the owner of the DSL account, Prevost was considered responsible under the law.

But because Prevost attempted (Google Translate) to provide a legitimate explanation of what had happened—without a lawyer—he consequently admitted his own guilt of not having secured his WiFi network. By saying that it was his wife who had downloaded the songs, Prevost handed over the prosecution all the evidence it needed, as otherwise it would have needed to prove that he had not done so.

"In the meantime people have nothing to fear: The best remedy against Hadopi is to say, ‘I didn't do it!’" Zimmerman added. "If this guy hadn't self-incriminated, he would have never been fined."

Or, as the French tech site Numérama (Google Translate) summed it up: "We can applaud the honesty, but regret the naïveté."

Summons upon summons

In an interview with a French tech news site, PCInpact (Google Translate), Prevost explained his situation was complicated by the fact that because he was going through a divorce, and after he received the first two warnings, he apparently took the pre-emptive step of taking his own household offline.

"I had a first warning and then a second," he said. "But I sent a letter to [the Hadopi agency] via my wife’s lawyer, who had to follow-up! Nothing else happened, except Hadopi sent me e-mails, but I wasn’t able to receive them as I had no Internet."

Prevost added that the Hadopi agency summoned him to Paris to explain himself, but because he would have had to bear the cost of traveling to the capital (likely over €100 in travel costs alone), he said, "I’m not going to Paris for that sort of thing!"

When Prevost ignored the Hadopi agency, he was summoned to his local police station, where he explained everything.

"I gave a statement saying that I had not, did not install this download site, nor download these two songs," he told PCInpact. "They’re two Rihanna tracks. I can’t tell you the titles—I don’t know anything. It was my wife who did it, and I’m going through a divorce."

The local police then apparently invited him to have his computer "cleaned" by a local IT firm at a cost of €50 ($64).

"After that, I didn’t hear from anyone until July when I received a summons to court for these songs," he explained. "But I sent the proof [of the cleaning] to the police. The police told me to bring the paper saying your computer was cleaned. I was summoned on Saturday morning, and by the afternoon it was done."

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."