‘Freeze p2p file share acccounts’
p2p news / p2pnet: The Big Four Organized Music record labels are demanding that two British ISPs freeze the accounts of almost 60 people thought to have shared music with each other online.
The BPI (British Phonographic Industry), owned by EMI (UK), Warner Music (US), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany), has been ferreting around by itself and now says it’s found unequivocal evidence of copyright infringement via their services.
Forty-two C&W IP addresses and 17 from Tiscali, have been used to upload significant amounts of music under copyright, the BBC has the ‘trade’ unit saying, going on, The BPI said it could identify the service being used but that only the ISPs know to whom the addresses belong.
The US music industry tried to force telecoms companies to reveal the names of their customers allegedly using file-sharing networks to illegally share songs, but it lost a legal battle to do so in 2004, says the story.
It had a similar lack of success when it tried to do the same in Canada.
As things stand in the UK and elsewhere, the Big Four have to get court-approved subpoenas against John and Jane Doe ISP address holders, “which then can be served on ISPs, allowing consumers to challenge the claims before their names are disclosed,” says the BBC.
Reuters quotes Tiscali as saying it doesn’t automatically suspend customer accounts “on request,” but does so, “on occasion following an investigation”.
(Thanks, Ian)
Digg this.
Also See:
BBC – Industry to stop ‘music cheats’, July 10, 2006
Reuters – Internet providers urged to lock out file-sharers, July 10, 2006
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July 10th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
âunequivocal evidence of copyright infringement via their servicesâ.
I’d love to know what they think that means. Is it
a) A major operation shipping data to a pressing plant which is then pressing DVDs and CDs for sale
or
b) A music lover with a 64Gb library of music and a copy of limewire who uploads and downloads a few gb per month.
or
c) Your next door neighbour’s 14 year old, who has 1000 songs they got from their mates and a badly configured copy of Kazaa.
or
d) Somebody running BitTorrent to watch the latest series of Alias because it’s not shown in the UK.
July 11th, 2006 at 7:44 am
âunequivocal evidence of copyright infringement via their servicesâ.
This means they know that the downloaders don’t have an original copy of the media they are downloading.
But they don’t know this, so it’s NOT unequivocal.
It’s supposition, assumption, conjecture, etc.
Which is how these industries build up their “stats”.
July 11th, 2006 at 7:58 am
In the UK it may not matter. There’s precious little case law but there have been a couple of cases where the only crime was offering for download regardless of the original source.