Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

The Telegraph reports that Virgin Media are trialling a policy in which they trace people who illegally download copyrighted material and then write letters to them telling them to stop. Virgin Media just happens to be the first ISP to come to an agreement with the BMI but more will follow once the government decides to legislate, which is supposed to be this month.

A couple of problems I can foresee are that there are millions of files shared that aren’t illegal to share. Surely the ability to track each of the rights of every file on the network is far beyond the capacity of a few bods at the BPI (it’s the BPI that will be doing the grunt work, after all)? Plus, the current favored method of file sharing is to use torrents, which are hashed for extra confusion, the ISP doesn’t see the file name. Without listening or watching every piece of copyrighted material there is no means of tracking the material without the correct file name. My knowledge of how ISPs work is sketchy at best but it all seems a little far fetched. How about public access networks? How about people who share WiFi connections using the Fon network? Sounds like scaremongering. That being said, people have been fined in the past from data obtained from ISPs, presumably this will simply spur people on to develop technology that shields the contents from the ISP altogether?

Any thoughts on this?