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Government wins: Major UK ISPs forced to fight piracy for BPI

Tags: sharing, identify, letters, industry

In what the British Phonographic Industry is calling a 'ground-breaking' agreement, the six largest ISPs in the UK are to send hundreds of thousands of letters to their customers who have been reported by the BPI to be illegally sharing music over the Internet.

The agreement is a result of negotiations facilitated by the government's Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and comes less than two months after ISP Virgin Media began sending similar letters to its customers on behalf of the BPI.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Motion Pictures Association of America has also signed the agreement. Exactly what its involvement will be is unknown, but we expect it'll want a piece of the stop-sharing-our-products-or-you'll-lose-your-Interwebs action too.

The ISPs -- BT, Virgin, Tiscali, Orange, Sky and Carphone Warehouse -- themselves will not be responsible for policing their networks, however. Instead, the BPI will be acting to identify customers it believes are engaging in copyright infringement. It will then report an infringer's IP address to the ISP that assigned it, prompting the ISP to send out a letter highlighting, among other things, how music piracy is wrecking the lives of A-list musicians and forcing them into ever smaller and smaller mansions.

This will all be considered a first step and will take place in the first year of the programme. During this time, agreement signatories will also "work together to identify effective mechanisms to deal with repeat offenders", Crave has learnt. It has not been specified what these 'mechanisms' will involve, but we don't rule out the possibility of blacklists detailing repeat offenders being shared between participating ISPs.

It's the ultimate goal of the music industry to encourage file sharers to move to legal download stores or back to good ol' CDs. Perhaps if the countless millions of music lovers already doing so weren't being treated like criminals with overpriced, DRMed downloads, they already would have.

Will scary letters from the music industry convince you to fall back in love with them? Will they persuade you to use the DRM-free, fairly priced, universally simple and device-agnostic download services that don't exist in this country yet?

The comments section below is, as always, open to your most heart-felt comments and opinions. -Nate Lanxon

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Comments (15)

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Comments

AnonymousThu 24 July, 2008 11:43am

Which are the major ISPs?

AnonymousThu 24 July, 2008 12:05pm

So - They intend to spy on our activity even more for a media that I always felt should be to some extent free. Music companies have never understood there customer base and probably never will & with the advent of media sharing there literally crapping the pants.

Upset to say the least.

DavidRGilsonThu 24 July, 2008 12:53pm

Without getting into a deep intellectual discussion on the subject, this smacks of two things to me.

1) It's like the post office policing what we send through the post.

and more importantly

2) This will not make me buy more music.

Also, for all these places that say they're doing DRM free music downloads. How come I still can't find any music I like without DRM on, if I can find it for download sale at all?

scrappydooThu 24 July, 2008 1:52pm

And there was me thinking that it was illegal to monitor web traffic under our law? Or will business take priority over the rights of the population?

And what's to stop people from then setting up encrypted torrent sites that spread through virtual word of mouth, encrypt all files and then they would have to go to more expense to gain the authority to break encryption?

Am sure they have the money to do it but then it might just result in a 'guilty until proven innocent' culture, which is what seems to exist at the minute.

Enough complaining how about a solution - standardise international pricing for online purchases!

weetanhopsThu 24 July, 2008 9:33pm

Unless I get to pay as much as the Americans do for their music then this idea can go where the sun doesn't shine. I am sick of the EU (and especially GB) paying more than we should for everything from clothes to electronics... even digital content for crying out loud!

AnonymousThu 24 July, 2008 11:52pm

Since the ISPs are not actively policing their networks (small mercies), I'm interested to know how the BPI select their targets. How are they able to determine which users are pirating files without direct access to users' data traffic?

AnonymousFri 25 July, 2008 10:24am

The BPI won't be able to monitor all file sharing networks, they will mainly be targeting the Gnutella network which Limewire runs on. Limewire does not offer any encryption services that I am aware of. Torrenting should be okay especially current versions of uTorrent as you can go into uTorrents settings and enforce Protocol Encryption. I would reccomend that file sharers should install PeerGuardian and configure ipfilter.dat with there firewalls.q

mohammed.jiwaFri 25 July, 2008 12:53pm

Maybe if music companies went to the trouble of treated the musicians more fairly, with more money, I'd be more inclined to care about purchasing music. At the moment, when you buy music, you barely support the artist - you support the music industry big-wigs so they can get high and mistreat the people who make them money.
Let's not forget the freedom of information breaches this decision involves. 1984 anyone?

AnonymousFri 25 July, 2008 4:34pm

it wont stop peopl. if they cant download lode it free then we go back to recordin it of you tube, the radio or the tv

AnonymousFri 25 July, 2008 11:47pm

Go Radiohead!
I bet all the CEO's of the (no respect)ive Industries, choked on their silver spooned cornflakes when they read the revenue pulled in on a "pay what you like album".
Might be a good indicator of the future musicians "integrity" and " We're only doin' it for the love of music/ doin' it for the kids", by watching which company they sign to...
When I buy a cd/dvd in future, first thing I'm gonna check is the company logo that got it onto the shelf...

DRM's? I thought that meant Doesn't Register Music.

AnonymousSat 26 July, 2008 2:03am

As far as I and Me buddys are concerned they can F oFF ,JOG ON Etc, Thats for starters they seem to forget it would`nt take a whole lot to lift a manhole and destroy a million pound link! How dare they threaten us !Their paying public for backing up our files and previous purchases! At the end of the day We buy there over priced CD`s which seem to fail after two or three plays! So by Buying these Album`s do We not own a licence to own these tune`s? I Know We do, So How can these Record company`s etc threaten us With downloading a backup version of the disc/disc`s We have already purchased, that because of there cheap production methods Failed within a few playbacks.(I thought C.D`S were indestructable) Yes B.S! I speak the truth please do not justify lies with further lies,I work within th U.S and U.K Intel Communities.

tech-point.co.ukSat 26 July, 2008 1:31pm

Smaller and Smaller mansions haha

AnonymousTue 29 July, 2008 10:49am

I still can't see how they expect to be able to see WHAT I download. A 700MB file called The_Black_Knight.avi could be a pirate copy of the film. Or, it could be a video file of something completely different, with a filename that suggests otherwise. Essentially, short of accessing the files on my hard drive and examining them all, then running extensive checks to ensure I really don't have permission to own any copies of copyrighted material that they may find, how can they send out accusing letters? With no hard, non-disputable evidence that the law has been broken, how can an organisation that doesn't represent the police expect to threaten people without it turning out that they themselves are breaking at least one law? This is nuts. Truly it is insane.

Philip BainThu 7 August, 2008 12:57pm

Nice picture of Sox in a bag of fruit!