A recent article found on ‘The Register’ reads as follow;
Virgin Media could soon become the second major ISP to attempt to implement a “three strikes” system against illegal filesharers in partnership with the record industry.
The cable company is in talks with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to trial a system of warnings, followed by disconnection, for the most persistent copyright infringers.
It’s the same scheme that Tiscali briefly put in place last summer. That led to 24 customers being disconnected after allegedly ignoring the warnings, but relations between Tiscali and the BPI collapsed in a row over how the costs should be shared.
In a statement today, Virgin Media said: “We have been in discussions with rights holders organisations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favour a sensible voluntary solution.”
A spokesman promised that customers will be told when any trial begins, but couldn’t say when that will be.
Under the proposed three strikes rules, BPI enforcement agents will detect IP numbers participating in copyright-infringing peer to peer networks. They will alert the ISP, which will voluntarily send out warnings to stop or face disconnection from the net.
My take on this, well to begin with im a little confused by the term ‘voluntary scheme’ someone wanna explain how thats gonna work, cus i sure as hell aint signing up to have virgin trawl through my online traffic hunting for illegal P2P contents and thats kinda what it sounds like… unless it means virgin are planning to volunteer themselves as a guinea pig for this service, which makes me wonder how much crapper their service is going to get !
As for 3 strikes, not quite comfortable with that either, how do u judge a strike… ISP’s as we all know keep logs of data traffic for random periods of time, this is done by law. But in the case of knocking off peoples strikes, is it a case of saying ‘hey, were giving u a warning because a log showed u downloading ‘pirates of the caribbean’ 6 months ago, and another strike for ‘lost in space’ 4 months ago… oh and we spotted that ‘lesbian chicks’ one u grabbed yesterday… guess thats your three strikes, goodbye !” kinda worrying, but sounds like Virgin media logic to me !
Well either way, iv been looking for a good excuse to rip that crappy motorola modem off the wall and throw it at a passing Virgin van for years, if this monitoring systems comes into reality, it might be the straw that sends this donkey running to BT for a new landline and ‘be’ internet for 24Mbps service !
