Virgin shies away from anti-P2P threats
p2pnet news Music | P2P:- A panicky Virgin Media has disavowed itself of any possibility of taking legal action against, or banning, its customers as part of a corporate music campaign aimed at P2P file sharers.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s BPI (British Phonographic Industry) wants all UK ISPs to, “sign up to a so-called three strikes policy – where users of file sharing networks get two warnings and are then disconnected if they are sharing copyright files,” we said earlier today, quoting BPI boss Geoff Taylor from a BBC story.
The BPI said it was, “prepared to back up the education campaign with legal action, including taking ISPs to court”.
But, “It’s doomed to fail,” predicted Will McGree, 20, a recipient of a BPI ‘legal action’ warning’.
“Virgin Media will lose a lot of customers over this because people don’t like to be accused of stealing music over their morning coffee.
“It made me feel betrayed. I was under the impression that I paid Virgin Media money to keep my internet connection protected and safe.”
Now, Virgin Media has promised the BBC there’s, “absolutely no possibility” of, “taking legal action or banning internet users as part of a campaign against illegal file-sharing on its broadband network”.
What’s the point of this really bad PR exercise, then?
Or does Virgin really believe paying lip-service to Big 4 demands will keep it in their good graces for future reference and at the same time, persuade users to keep away from the P2P networks.
The Beeb goes on >>>
Letters seen by Newsbeat came in an envelope labelled “Important. If you don’t read this, your broadband could be disconnected.”
Virgin now claims that phrase was a “mistake” and it is running an “education-only” campaign that does not make any sort of judgement about the activity of its users.
Asam Ahmad from Virgin said: “It is important to let our customers know that their accounts have been used in a certain way but we are happy to accept it may not be the account holder that’s involved.
“It could be someone else in the family or someone living in a shared house. It could even be someone stealing wi-fi. We are not making any form of accusation.”
The firm has already sent 800 letters to customers, “warning that they should not be using ‘unauthorised peer-to-peer networks’ like BitTorrent or Limewire to swap copyright songs,” adds the story.
Stay tuned.
.
.Stumble It!
then disconnected – Virgin goes after UK P2P file sharers, July 3, 2008
BBC – Virgin defends file-sharing campaign, July 3, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
What an excellent way to tarnish your reputation and drive away users. Although it’s clear this isn’t for educational purposes, but instead, to force users into buying (read: licensing) content from them; hence the uma thurman adverts. They have a vested interest in eradicating file sharing, for it directly competes with it’s own offerings. How can they compete with free and convenient ? They can’t, and thus here we are.
This is a slippery road. Their actions today may seem innocuous, but tomorrow, it may be entirely nocuous. I wouldn’t trust them in anyway whatsoever. Their actions of late speak loudly of total disregard for users, and their privacy.
July 4th, 2008 at 2:49 am
is nocous a word?
July 4th, 2008 at 3:25 am
It’s like this. Corporate, recently-produced movies and music are 94 percent completely, utterly lame and uninteresting, anyway. I use eMule to pirate copyrighted files, but do so because what I like to download is not available anywhere other than at locations which require me to use a credit card if I want to purchase them, and for many different, unrelated reasons I do not use, and will not ever be able to use or even wish to use a credit card. The stuff I download is obscure. It is mostly from the psychedelic-era 60’s and early ’70s, occasionally, from the more recent 30 years, but still underground, mostly, and very difficult to find even at used recording stores — the movies are certainly not Blockbuster rentals…A lot of this stuff literally is not even available for purchase anywhere unless it’s special-ordered, which is quite expensive, again requires credit to be used most of the time. I am on a very fixed income because of disability and a few hard breaks that require me to funnel what little money I have into some means of securing shelter and food, I just don’t have an entertainment budget. The Big 4 are losing exactly $0.00 to me each time I download a file on eMule. If I get the file I don’t buy it. If I don’t get the file I don’t buy it.
However, I got a cease-and-desist from Warner last month. Now I make a point of – as much as possible – refusing to buy ANYTHING from a subsidiary of this monolith and that’s a LOT of stuff, there. They essentially made certain that for the rest of my life, when I DO have an entertainment budget, Warner won’t get a cent of it. If they’d not threatened to snip my pipe, I would still buy their products if I wanted to see a movie on a theatre screen with friends or own an album to play on my co-worker’s non-mp3-based sound system…
Filesharers need to ALL be doing this.
The big corporations might have all the money, power etc. but who gives it to them? MAKE THEM SWEAT and understand they could forfeit a lot, if filesharing is taking that big a bite from them, what if every last one of them stopped buying ANY product made by a Warner subsidiary if Warner sends them a C&D via their ISP? If ten thousand filesharers did that, in a month…I daresay some policy re-evaluation might start getting discussed.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Julie Strael
what file did they get you for? would be interesting to know if said RIAA material is even published in the uk and its obscurity.
p.s do the letter list the appeal process?
July 4th, 2008 at 10:07 am
10,000 filesharers is nothing.
Make that 10,000,000 filesharers to boycott the industry completely.
Quite frankly, I’ve got better things to do than travel 10 miles, then paying way over £10 to see a movie with foyer shops charging stupid prices for snacks; the whole cinema and even the films themselves are choc-a-blok with product placement and preceded by industry threats and warnings and more adverts.
Yucky.
July 4th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I recently used BitTorrent to download a one-season US TV show. It’s never been released on DVD or even video tape. There isn’t even anywhere to buy it! The copies I downloaded were blurry copies taken from recordings of the original broadcasts. Better than nothing, but where are the DVDs of the show?
A while back, I downloaded a 5 season, Canadian kids’ show that I used to watch. That’s not available on DVD either.