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BPI Defends Anti-File-Sharing Partnership With Virgin Media
MrSteveSD writes "The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has responded to criticism by Bill Thomson over its collusion with Virgin Media in targeting UK file sharers. BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor personally wrote to the BBC to set things straight, and he asserts that 'it's Mr Thompson, rather than music companies, who is stuck in the past.' Of course, Virgin Media customers who download music and TV legally often find their connections being turned down to unusable speeds due to Virgin's aggressive throttling policy."
Mike also points out a blog entry that describes one of the letters received by a Virgin Media customer. In the letter were suggestions regarding the customer's router settings and anti-virus software.
you let a record company also run an isp.
there should be laws against running businesses cross fields.
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I am willing to bet I'm not the only one who wondered why the British Porn Industry was partnering with Virgin, before rereading the first sentence.
That's okay, I will not give any money the two-faced Virgin ISP or any two-faced UK record company. How do they feel about the loss of my money as a possible subscriber / music listener?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I actually read the letter this guy got and this comment stood out:
"But, when I do, it does mean that traffic from other machines could be dropping out through my pipe because my laptopâ(TM)s configured as a Tor exit."
Sorry guy, but you are responsible for any traffic that comes thru your connection. its part of the contract. You violate the contract you can be cut off. Take it like a man.
We can debate all day long if there is such a thing as IP rights, if throttling is ok or the letters are proper ( i happen to think they should go suck an egg personally and don't believe in IP rights ) but using the argument 'it wasn't my PC' is pretty flimsy when you are running a proxy drain point intentionally.
Yet another reason we should all be using freenet.. you cant pin the 'act' down on anyone in particular. All they can do is bitch that you are using too much bandwidth.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
you are talking about a company that has its real roots in record business, all its corporate lore, connections, even high level executives formed in there. just as microsoft is still 80s microsoft despite it runs in a very different format now, virgin is still virgin in corporate culture.
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You know, I don't think I would mind too much if the movie/music industry were to go the way of the buggy whip makers.
Yeah sure there are some mega-hit songs and some blockbuster movies I would have to go without, but there are other things in life. In fact it might be better for the art of music and movies as every work would have to be an indie work.
The movie/music industries need to stop thinking they are entitled to exist.
Then I can get out of the last nine months of my cable contract with Virgin and move to Freesat :-)
Go ahead Virgin, make my day!!
I'm on Virgin and I can confirm that the service they offer, at least in our city, is ropey. No, it's beyond ropey. The connection regularly drops, the cable tv service they offer freezes, broadband speeds are about 25% of advertised. And so on. Customer Service's advice? Switch eveything off and on. Great. Anyhow - given their vague service I really don't think I could tell whether they are throttling my connection or whether it's service as usual - but if one of those letters lands on my mat I will switch ISP. Even if it means going back to a dial up service. And for the record, their trains are no better.
Well, I suppose deaf people spend even less in buying music. The error, as always, is assuming buying would be an option for people who download illegally.
I recently downloaded an old movie from a torrent. I would have paid, maybe $1, for that movie. It's on sale at Amazon for $14.95. If I didn't have the option of an illegal download, I simply wouldn't have watched it. There's no way I'll pay $15 for something that's worth at most $1 to me.
What truly undermines that market aren't illegal downloads. Until the industry learns how to calculate pricing according to market rules, they'll have to live with it.
I disagree with Virgin - but this guy doesn't quite realize what he's been doing?
He's running a net anonymizer - and he was logged as having downloaded a Winehouse song. He says he ain't done it, but maybe someone on the net running Tor did - maybe he doesn't quite get it ?
If I lend my house to some idiot, and there is a report of someone having brought stolen property into my house, that doesn't make me a thief, but it doesn't mean the report is baseless either.
Edmund
This is not a signature.
You can not have both freespeech&Privacy AND copyright enforcement. Since therefore, all communications need to be monitored. Good by last "free" medium.
whether this is in England or North America. Cable companies and large ISPs in general have the same problem in most places.
They did not invest in infrastructure of the future at any point in the past. That is to say that they have never done what was needed to build a network that would support heavy usage.
An example of this is the cable company that I have to use (there are no options. Satellite is not a viable option for broadband IMO). I have three cable boxes on digital cable. If I rent a movie in the living room I can't move to the bedroom to watch it without having to pay twice. This means there is NO infrastructure built to know I have two boxes and which they are so that I can rent a movie once and watch anywhere in the house. This is not just ignorant of the capabilities of technology, it is blatantly ignoring them at the cost of value to the consumer.
There are a few people that would defend this situation with various excuses, but they won't work IMO because of the complaints that ISPs make regarding network usage, and the balance of guilt when you see what they were given as incentives to build a viable, usable network already.
Their business plan has been designed to steal as much money from the user's pockets and the government as possible. They have done nothing less.
This business of throttling traffic because of bandwidth usage is criminal in nature. If you rented a car to drive to your aunt's house but found that you weren't able to drive the expected speeds on all roads because of crippling by the rental company, would you sue? would you rent from them again? would you complain to the appropriate regulatory agency?
Go ahead, tell me about the fine print in the contract. meh. I pay for xyz MBits/second and I have more than reasonable expectation that this is what I'll be able to get regardless of protocol, end destination, or content.
The fact that I can't and that ISPs are throttling the service that I paid for is criminal. Their business model is broken. period. They have oversold their network to steal money from you and I, and now they got caught. It is convenient for them to blame the BPI and **AA, and there may indeed be collusion, but the fact remains that they did NOT use the money they were given to produce a usable network and are now trying, AGAIN, to get the users or government to pay them extra to build one.
Why, yes, I do have a solution. I'm glad you asked. The last mile should never belong to a private enterprise. It should belong to co-operatives or the local council or some group that is directly responsible to the local public. By responsible, I mean by order of a vote, they can be replaced and the performance of the cooperative is judged on whether they keep their jobs in a way similar to how AT&T boardmembers are responsible to the share holders.
Yes, all that AT&T, Virgin, Verizon, Comcast et all can do is provide network services. They can only hook up their big pipes to the local WAN and provide backbone network services. You can subscribe to their email etc. or you can subscribe to someone else's email and home page portal. You would be able to access Google via any of them network service packages. Like emergency services, email services would be possible without having long distance.
Once network services are separated from last mile and provisioning services, their worth will be seen in the correct light, and all this throttling will become a thing of the past, a memory of bad times when criminals ran the board meetings and made marketing decisions for cable companies.
When consumers have the right to choose and can do so with a phone call, then the market place will work as it should.
In short, Fuck Virgin! and all their warlord comrades around the world.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I do criticise Virgin Media, and their service has gone downhill since they were cabletel/ntl (and at the ntl era their service was already going downhill) but they are still better than any other provider that I can think of. I needed to get a broadband deal, and they offered me 2mb with phone for £15.50, with unlimited downloads. Consider if you go with BT the best you can get is with Talk Talk (40GB download limit) for a similar price, but BT love their £100 connection fee for getting you onto the network. I was not happy, and most of the providers are the same. Rip-off Britain where we get screwed and pay out of the nose for it.
I think it would help greatly if BPI and the other record industry associations would stop talking about "consumers". We are their CUSTOMERS. Major difference. A consumer is an anonymous, generalised person that has the sole purpose of spending money. A customer however is someone you have a business relationship with.
In TFA, the BPI is talking about "consumers" when talking about people that are enjoying music and other recordings, but "customers" when they are talking about the ISP. BPI doesn't have customers, obviously. So no wonder they don't care about what the people want. And the people don't care about the record companies either: they are just consumers, supposed to just consume whatever is recorded.
Not that I fully agree with the original column, the reply by PBI is particularly sickening. The attitude they present is so high-hearted, as if they are God and the consumers exist only to serve them. I do understand the record companies have a big problem on their hand, but the last thing any reasonable business should do is sue their own customers. Oh well, they don't have customers, there are just consumers. And who cares about consumers, because they will consume anyway.
Oh, by the way, there's also Azureus Vuze, among others, who rely on filesharing to work, even as they allow for-pay downloads. We believe that ISPs, far from being a simple pipe, can become significant distributors of digital media, and share in the tremendous value that would be unleashed if more music were accessed legally online. Ah, now their true colors come out. To everyone who pointed out that BPI is no longer the same company as the music label, it looks as though they still want a piece of the pie. But despite the proliferation of licensed services, most music is still downloaded from unlicensed services - a problem that cannot be addressed through new models alone. Ok, one, how is that a problem? It's a problem if they aren't using your model -- not that they're getting music illegally. A download is not necessarily a lost sale.
And two, if it can't be addressed through new models alone, it can't be addressed -- again, without significant collateral damage.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"British Pornographic Industry". Tell me I'm not the only one who read that first time round.
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
BPI Defends Anti-File-Sharing Partnership With Virgin Media
You're still a bunch of assholes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The letter is just the least scary stuff in that blog post.
This guy leaves his wireless network wide open because "it's easier to do it this way", says he doesn't need antivirus because "I'm a Linux user so it's not exactly necessary".
At the same time he runs Tor and plans to install a home server as a Tor node. If you're using Tor, that's probably to protect your privacy: would you feel comfortable with your packets passing through a setup like that?
Anyone else read that as British PORNographic Industry?
if supreme court acts to protect corporate interests at the expense of the people, and 'interprets' law to that effect, i dont see any issues with a president trying to bypass supreme court.
lets remember that not only the law but also tradition of france was that 'ruling and privileges are aristocracy's god given rights', and in years leading up to 1789 all aristocrats were defending the 'law', and courts were deciding upon that law.
this example should make it clear that law is not always right. especially in a country like u.s. where corporate lobbyists can buy out laws as they please and make them pass through house and president by pressurizing them from different fronts.
yes, in short you really need a president like fdr now. for the balance is WAY off to the corporate side.
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The blog entry is full of stupidity. He refuses to secure his wifi network because he has 6 pcs and 'finds it easier' without a key. Well Einstein, don't be surprised if you get more letters from Virgin and the BPI. /rant
explicitly forbids open WiFi routers and they actually go around in trucks looking for them.
This is nothing to do with Vista, you fucking moron.
Your point was sensible up until the final sentence, but you couldn't resist making an off-topic jab at 'Microdollaroft'.
Stupid cunt.
This account is part of the twitter Army. Please mod down.
...is that they actually know and list the specific songs (Amy Winehouse).
They should at least try to give the impression that they're not spying so much by simply saying that the connection's been used in a way that violates the terms.
why can't I just provide a forum for others
http://www.bartleby.com/66/40/63040.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's
As far as I remember, the problem of slow web page loading _was_ solved by adding bandwidth in the late nineties. I had dialup, then I got DSL, and I no longer worried about slow page loading.
Cheers.
Bill Thompson says in his article that he's not breaching copyright as he feels downloading a show is no different than recording it.
Fair enough - but he convienently doesn't mention that he's uploading it as well, as he said he uses BitTorrent. Whether you feel on the morality of it, he's being disingenuous.
Big money sucking off big money... Who woulda thunk it...
they chose not to and still refuse to do so.
Lies by omission are still lies. Keep lying to everyone, but nobody outside your payrolls is buying it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
if enough of you people would just wake up and supported a candidate that's reasonable, even if s/he is not put forth by the dominant 2 parties.
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Virgin is my ISP. I don't use torrents, not often anyways, normally for downloading distros.
If I ever recieve such a letter I shall write back asking for more specifics on their monitoring processes and how they legally comply with RIPA (a criminal law) for the benefit of them protecting a 3rd party's IP rights (a civil matter).
VM - listen to your customers' they are more important to you than a political loby group.
well folks, heres the thing, i got a 20mbps broadband connection from virgin media...
now, i know that downloading music and movies and all can be illegal if i dont pay for it but heres a few things that one can do and there would be nothing at all illegal about them and people can consume the bandwidth they are paying for...
A) start downloading:
1- linux distributions (choose any, download it from that nice torrent and IF you have any time, install it in a vm or through xen (if u dont have time today, you can always delete it and download it again tomorow)) (this is a recursive process with the base condition bein virgin media stoppin bandwidth policing)
2- download alpha, beta and final versions of open source softwares like open office, xen, umbrello, qt, compiz, open arena, alien arena, glest etc, who knows, you might bump into some new software that you never tried before and you totally fall in love with it...(try glest, its a real time strategy game and the graphics are pretty extremely neat)
B) youtube is legal then why do we need to download our music in the first place (A)?
C) start playing open source fps games like alien arena and open arena online....
id like to see virgin stop me from doin this, theres nothin at all illegal about any of this and if virgin does not want me to do this.... so bad for them! i m goin to try my best to claim my moneys worth by utilizing the 20mbps that im paying for!!!!