More than a month after a French court convicted its first three-strikes offender under the anti-P2P regime known as Hadopi, the French government will be continuing the controversial program into 2013. And despite a reduced budget, Hadopi will also begin policing pirated video games, in addition to films and music.

The US has been gearing up for the implementation of a similar six-strikes anti-piracy program, due to hit our networks in the coming weeks.

According to a recently released government document (French, PDF) entitled "2013 Report on Independent Public Authorities," Hadopi’s annual budget will be reduced from €10.3 million ($13.36 million) to €8 million ($10.37 million) in 2012. The agency’s 2011 budget was €11.4 million.

Some in the French media (via Google Translate) have speculated that Hadopi may be expanding its mandate not under pressure from the entertainment industry, but rather as a way to stave off irrelevance.

This new move (via Google Translate) appears to be contrary to the goals previously stated by President François Hollande's new administration. In August, the new French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, seemed to suggest that Hadopi was on the outs. She said that she would recommend a "significant" reduction in Hadopi spending.

"In financial terms, [spending] €12 million ($14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails," she told Le Nouvel Observateur.

Last month, the Hadopi law led to the first three-strikes conviction of a man charged with illegally downloading two Rihanna songs that his wife publicly admitted to downloading on his Internet connection.

The French government report also notes that the agency will add six employees, despite a budgetary reduction, and says that the new agents will allow for an expansion of the total number of three-strikes warnings, from around 800,000 to 1,100,000. The three levels of warnings, most controversially, can end with an offender being cut off from the Internet for a month, although that penalty has yet to be enforced.

The report predicts "an anticipated increase [in warnings sent by Hadopi] due to a new information system that can, in particular, deal with referrals from a new rights-holder (video games)." It also noted that Hadopi would finally be able to send warnings electronically (Google Translate), rather than only by phone or postal mail.

At that rate, Hadopi will be sending out approximately two warnings per minute for an entire year.