What the Copyright Alert System reported: alerts, appeals and outcomes

Archive summary, written 2026. The six strikes program published one detailed public report on its own results. This page sets out what that report said, figure by figure, and what critics said was missing. It belongs to our Copyright Alert System archive; this site is not the Center for Copyright Information, which published the report.

Every number below comes from CCI's own announcement of the report or from a contemporary reading of it. Each one keeps the base the source used: "the first 10 months", "during 2013" or "of all alerts". The numbers mix those bases, so they do not always add up as neatly as they look.

01The first progress report, May 2014

The report was called "Phase One and Beyond". CCI announced it on May 28, 2014, in a release distributed by PR Newswire. CCI said it was the first time since launch that it had shared specific figures on the size of the program. The report was written with CCI's members, advisory board and technical experts.

The headline figures, as CCI stated them:

• 1.3 million alerts were sent in the initial 10 months of the program, most in the early educational phases.
• The program was expected to at least double in its second year.
• 265 review requests were filed with the American Arbitration Association, with no findings of false positives.
• In a CCI-commissioned survey, 62% of respondents said infringing activity was never acceptable, and 65% said more resources on what is and is not legal would help.

CCI's executive director, Jill Lesser, said the first 10 months suggested the program had "the potential to move the needle" on infringement. The RIAA's co-chair of the CCI board called it reliable and respectful of consumers.

02How alerts thinned out stage by stage

CCI said more than 70% of the alerts delivered were at the initial educational stages, and less than 3% were at the final mitigation stage. CCI read this as a sign that most people stopped after a warning or two, which was the program's central bet.

Reading the same report, the EFF wrote on June 2, 2014 that the 1.3 million alerts went to about 722,000 subscribers, and that 60,477 subscribers received some kind of mitigation measure. Those figures come from the EFF's reading of the report, not from a separate count.

The two framings tell different stories from the same data. In CCI's framing, alerts dropped sharply as they moved up the ladder. In the EFF's framing, tens of thousands of households had their internet use slowed, interrupted or gated in the first year. The report did not say which measure each one got or for how long.

How each step worked is explained in our guide to the six alert stages.

03Appeals and their results

CCI's announcement said subscribers filed 265 review requests based on the more than 1.3 million alerts generated during 2013. It described this as 0.27% of mitigation alerts that qualified for review, which in turn was 0.02% of all alerts sent.

CCI said that not one review identified an invalid notice or false positive. It counted 47 successful challenges in 2013, and said most of them used the "unauthorized use of account" defense: the subscriber showed that someone outside the household had used the connection.

Supporters saw a system that got the facts right. Critics pointed out that review was only open at the mitigation stage, cost $35 unless waived, and allowed six defenses, so a low challenge rate could also reflect the barriers to asking. How the process worked, and how disputes run today, is on the page about challenging a wrongly sent alert.

04What the numbers could not show

The 2014 report answered how many alerts went out. It could not answer the question most people cared about: did six strikes reduce piracy? A drop in alerts at later stages fits the idea that warnings work, but it also fits people switching to streaming sites or VPNs that the program could not see.

The EFF's June 2014 review listed further gaps. The report did not say which penalties providers imposed, how long they lasted, or what the copyright "education" pages said. The EFF also argued that many of CCI's materials pointed people mainly to the pay-TV and on-demand services of CCI's own member companies.

Rights holders had complaints of their own. TorrentFreak reported on September 3, 2015 that CCI planned no new public figures before 2016. It added that several independent film studios had called the program an ineffective "sham", because only a small share of their notices were forwarded. Sending volumes were capped by the providers' agreements, which was one of the issues in talks to renew the deal.

05Read the originals

The full "Phase One and Beyond" report was posted on this domain in 2014 and is no longer here; web archives keep copies under the old address. CCI's own summary of it remains online in the May 28, 2014 press release, which carries every headline figure quoted on this page.

For the critical reading, the EFF's 2014 post is the most detailed contemporary response. For what happened after the report, read why the Copyright Alert System ended in 2017, and for how it began, the 2011 to 2013 launch.