ISP To Voluntarily Disconnect File-Sharers, Offers Free Usenet
Written by enigmax on March 31, 2008Virgin Media in the UK has announced that it is working with the music industry to chase down its file-sharing customers and disconnect them from the internet. At the same time, it will offer an enhanced service which will see its customers get free Usenet binaries access, untraceable by the music industry.
Anyone familiar with Virgin Media’s advertising (previously Telewest/Blueyonder) will recall their TV commercials over the last couple of years which centered round the ability to download greater and greater amounts of media, faster than ever before.
Their ‘Best Things in Life Are Free’ TV campaign, complete with eye-catching computer graphics, with movie and musical themes throughout left the viewer with a clear message: if you want to download music and movies quickly (for free), join us. Now, in 2008, the situation has changed dramatically. Kind of.
According to a report, the ISP has had a change of heart and will be working in collaboration with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Starting with a pilot scheme, the BPI will deviate from its stated policy of not going after individual file-sharers by targeting Virgin Media customers on P2P networks and reporting them to the ISP.
Set to go live during the next few months, and at the behest of the UK music industry, Virgin’s scheme will see them send warning letters out to customers flagged as file-sharers by the BPI. Those who do not heed warnings to stop will see Virgin disconnect them from the internet. The scheme will also be available to movie and TV studios who wish to punish Virgin’s customers.
Earlier this year the government said that ISPs should find a way to curb unauthorized downloading. By stepping up with its own plan, Virgin is hoping to side-step government enforced legislation.
A Virgin Media spokesman said: “We have been in discussions with rights holders organizations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favor a sensible voluntary solution.”
So as Virgin Media constantly upgrades its broadband customers to faster and faster connections over the last couple of years (4Mbit connections became 10Mbit, 10Mbit then became 20Mbit, 20Mbit due to become 40mb), it now agrees to punish the very people it targets when offering these super-fast connections.
However, all might not be lost for the file-sharer at Virgin Media, especially those who want to max-out their new bandwidth offering. The ISP will be rolling out a new newsgroup service for its subscribers which should be ready in the next couple of months. Using the Highwinds server banks, the service will offer 7 days retention on the all important binary newsgroups. A Virgin spokesman said: “We’re delighted to be working with Highwinds to build out our newsgroup service. Our expanded access to newsgroups will give our customers a free news feed to newsgroups with exceptional retention, providing one of the best free newsgroup services in the UK.”
Not to mention super high speed access to all the movies, music and software anyone could ever need, with no fear that the BPI, RIAA or IFPI can snoop on the transfers.
The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.
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140 Responses
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@25 I dont think virgin themselves are gunna be monitoring individual lines but are working in conjuction with all the media rights companies who jump on torrent swarms with modded torrent clients with the specific purpose of logging IP address’s to report to Isp’s
Oh shit. Like #13 I’m on VM and don’t have much choice about it.
I would like to point that this company _may_ be involved in terrorizing victims in their “sue ‘em all” marketing campaign. Logo and name are too similar.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&rls=en&hs=rsy&q=virgin+site%3Arecordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
Usenet is not the solution.
The music&movie industry probably already have their own subscription to Virgin Media, and are preparing to take the Usenet binaries issue to court, and most likely win the right to view the download logs from the binaries server.
This is centralized filesharing, which is SO much easier for the content industry to deal with.
Makes it much easier to sue people for copyright violations.
Dump Virgin and get another ISP, or start your own.
If there are thousands of ISPs in each country, it’ll be completely impossible for the content industry to deal with each of them. It’s much, much easier with just a few large ones.
There should of course be a coalition of ISPs, so if one gets attacked(sued) by the content industry, they join forces against the attack.
Start at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/
Virgin have been heavily involved in trying to push this illegal monitoring technology for the purpose of serving targeted ads. From there, it’s easy to start monitoring usenet usage, especially if they provide the access.
Besides, do you really think they’ll offer all the binary groups?
@29
Most professional services don’t keep download logs.
@ Someone else
Unless you have the traffic of usenet encrypted your isp can see what your doing.
@ Person calling VM crap, they obviously haven’t tried BT Broadband or, in particular, Tiscali.
Few pointers:
1. UK is still in 18th century. Fibre for end users will be available only when the rest of the world moves to brain wave transmissions and discovers worm holes in space.
There is plenty of fibre around in UK but unfortunately, it is all used for CCTV, so that police can laugh while you are getting mugged.
2. UK is rip-off, which basically means, sign up for 50Mb and get 0.5 down and 128K up. On top of that 90% of your traffic will be filled with ads and footie goal replays.
3. You will not be able to establish more than 1 VPN connection at a time without spending £££££ on a VPN concentrator. But in regard to that, see points 1 and 2.
4. British record industry are so influencial (keep in mind the Virgin’s main business) so that they can wrap anyone around their finger.
5. Brits do not care about EU, but do as they please.
With all that in mind, maybe it is best to move out of there as I have done last year?
And I don’t regret for a moment…
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Vigin media are the best; 20meg now 50meg later! How could they do this!!!!!!!!!!!! They were fast becoming the most popular isp in the and now they do ths. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! Save yourself, Vigin Media, or end up like comcast!!!!!
I’m wondering, how would the media companies have any knowledge of whether offenders have actually been disconnected?
Couldn’t Virgin just assign a new IP address and be done with it?
Could Virgin use the system as an excuse to disconnect subscribers that are deemed undesirable to their interests?
Who’s the objective authority; judge and jury? Is there any accountability?
Im a Virgin Media customer, and im not very clued up when it comes to newsgroups etc, If i want to continue sharing files via BitTorrent should i be worried yet? And should i be looking for an alternative ISP?
Im a bit confused by all this.
hehehe, finally. i wan’t to see you cry
#35 I wouldn’t worry about it, chances are it’ll amount to effectively nothing. If, on the otherhand, they do start freaking out kicking everyone then you’ll know about it and can make a decision from there.
P.S. I wouldn’t pay much attention to the newsgroup angle, it’s just fluff thrown in in an attempt to lessen the impact of the real news.
This whole affair is just stupid. 7 days retention is ridiculous. I feel sorry for Virgin subscribers.
Virgin Media? That sure sounds like a bunch of pedophiles to me. Where’s the good ol’ British mob when you need them?
suddenly something like relakks 5 euros a month VPN sounds quite attractive.
bring on the conservatives!!!!!!!! :)
@24
What VPN service do you use/suggest?
just a small enhancement, Telewest/Blueyonder > NTL > Virgin Media
PKZip - Virgin no longer own music industry companies. Virgin Records is owned by Guy Hands and EMI, V2 was sold to Universal and Virgin Megastores was bought out by mgt and renamed Savvi. This is just more hype from Virgin. Basically Branson looks saintly, VM get one in before SKY so take the moral high ground and as an earler poster mentioned they don’t want the big downloaders anyway. Of course the big question for me is - will Peer Guardian help at all. Otherwise I’m off to another ISP. VM are cheeky anyway. Tried selling up to the new HD box for another £30 odd without mentioning they have bugger all HD channels. Shysters. But thats Dickie B for you.
very very simple solution that can be easily implemented by tracker operators is ipfiltering. employ an ipfilter to stop the evil anti-p2p peers from connecting to the tracker
disable dht in the client and no evil peer can connect to you and log your activity
http://www.h33t.com is such a tracker that uses ipfiltering to keep evil peers off the network
be warned: a multi-tracker torrent that includes non-filtered trackers lets the evil peers back into the swarm. do not use multi-tracker torrents in combination with a ipfiltering tracker
h33t, the intentions sound reasonable but I doubt you’ll be able to identify all but the most obvious addresses they use.
agreed the defense is not instant because it relies on blocklist updates, accuracy and timing
however, tracker ipfiltering goes a long way to complicate the business of tracking swarms. all of the IP’s found in the MediaDefender email leak were already known to the blocklist specialists and in the level1
i disagree with the statement that all but the most obvious addresses will remain hidden. to work effectively the logging operation will be on a massive scale and the presence of those evil peers will be highlighted in the networks
once the logging operation is discovered, who they are, where they are, how they enter the network, then all their IP’s will be known. that is as incontrovertible as the fact there is no such thing as internet anonymity
get BTGuard NOW I THINK IT HELLOS
btguard.com/
i’d have more confidence in btguard if their site didn’t look like it had been designed by a 6 year old with some crayons
sounds a bit over the top to me
no actual solid announcement of what they’re going to be doing, when they’re going to do it and how. it’s just an article full of speculation.
I’m not denying virgin will do something; after all they may well be the only ISP that will gain from cutting pirates off due to their major link to the record industry.
and the newsgroups goes straight against the concept of piracy.
I’ll be surprised if anything happens any time soon.
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