Its becoming clear that palms have been greased at the political level here in the UK.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/bt_bpi_letter/ BT, the UK's largest broadband provider, has begun threatening subscribers with disconnection from the internet if it is told they are sharing copyright music over peer-to-peer networks, The Register has learned.
The firm recently sent an email to one of its four million retail broadband customers, who asked not to be named, alleging that she had illegally participated in a network sharing of Biology, a song by Girls Aloud.
The email reproduces evidence collected by the BPI. It purports to show she used the open source filesharing program Ares in May this year to infringe sound recording copyright. Ares can be used as a client for both Gnutella and BitTorrent networks.
Geoff Taylor, chief of UK record industry trade body the BPI, told The Register in a statement today: "Establishing partnerships with ISPs is the number one issue for the BPI, and we are beginning to form positive working relationships with BT, Virgin Media and most of the other major ISPs."
It's unclear whether BT has agreed to formally implement the record industry's preferred "three strikes" procedure that would see those accused of infringing music copyright warned twice and suspended or disconnected from the internet.
It seems that BT are urging folks to not use filesharing networks after receiving one of these third party "fake down" notices that are merley based on the full legal proof of ... (roll of drums ..lol) having a file in a shared folder, this could account for a recent increase in network monitoring we have been watching recently, of course countermeasures have been deployed to have a little fun with these data protection law-breaking criminals, I dont think the sky is falling in yet but its sure feels like we face a bully who is more than happy to allow companies to break the law in providing illegal logging evidence and threaten to break human rights legislation over what amounts to a single file offered for "potential" upload, downloaders are of course protected by law if a file is for their own personal use.
