ISPs and music industry announce piracy crackdown

Posted at: 6:28pm 24th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Major British ISPs confirm deal with the music industry to offer legal file-sharing facilities and educate customers about illegal downloads

The music piracy game could soon be up for illegal file sharers, as a new deal has been announced between the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and six of Britain’s major ISPs. The aim of the deal is to crack down on piracy, while offering better music download services.

The ISPs in question are Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BT, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse, all of which are now listed as a part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the BPI. The idea is that the music industry will make its music available online in a ‘user-friendly format, while ISPs will send out letters to known prolific file sharers, telling them that their activities have been noted.

Adam Webb from BMR (British Music Rights), which helped to negotiate the agreement, explained to Custom PC that ‘the ISPs have agreed to educate people about downloading – in essence that means that the others are going to replicate what Virgin Media have been doing [sending out letters], and BT started doing the other week. Then the record industry will take their side of the bargain by voluntarily agreeing to make available their music online in a wide range of user-friendly formats.’

The BMR sees this as a positive step in the battle against music piracy, which has often seen a hostile attitude between ISPs and the music industry. ‘ISPs and the music industry haven’t necessarily had the best relations in the past,’ said Webb, ‘so this is a really good starting point.’ He also stressed that this was a ‘voluntary agreement’ on behalf of the ISPs.

So how would the system work? Webb explained that ‘If you go onto BitTorrent, everyone else on BitTorrent can see your IP address. That’s essentially what the BPI would do - they would go onto BitTorrent, find out an IP address and ask the ISP to send a letter out. It’s not some great conspiracy where the BPI goes rifling through someone’s personal records.’

Webb explained some of the reasoning for the decision, saying that ‘the BMR commissioned some research from the University of Hertfordshire. It was really concentrated on young people, aged 14-25, and around 65 per cent of them admitted that they downloaded music form file sharing websites illegally, but 80 per cent of those said that they’d pay for a legal service.’

The BMR sees this as the start of a new generation of digital music services, where people are given what the music formats they want from the music industry, while the music industry gets a crackdown on piracy in return. ‘There’s obviously a way of making this work; monetising what people are doing and developing new business models,’ said Webb, ‘but you need an ISP on board in order to make that happen.’

Orange says that it ‘welcomes the industry-wide memorandum of understanding with content owners around improving consumers’ access to legitimate online download services.’ The ISP also said that it will ‘work with content owners and alert customers if they are allegedly in breech of any copyright laws.’ However, Orange also stressed that it will ‘not disconnect internet accounts for alleged copyright infringement or disclose customer details to content owners without a Court order.’