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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bring on the conservatives!!!!!!!! :)
R u on crak u frikin monkey. Fuk the conservatives and David Cammeron. Stoopid Twaaatin moron.
Somthing seems to be missing?
http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=news/press/news_content_file_1134.shtml
i hope the government does the legislating because what a holly cock up it will be.
them people wouldn’t understand technology or Internet if it jumped up and bit them
with government imposing their version i cannot wait for the knock on effect.
in effect it will change the rules of time for everything i.e post offices
if the law states they have to check every single packet for copyrighted.
then the post office would also be required to open every single post/letter too.
it would then role down to other company’s/businesses that operate online.
soon as anything you legally own copyrighted gets through you can sue then.
if you get spam/viruses anything that harm the pc then the ISP is at fault for
not checking the packets and the data to also see if its safe/copyrighted.
oOh the mess this is going to cause world wide is out of this world.
isp’s going to be shutting their doors, media companys will go bust.
as people who get kicked offline will start world wide boycotts of the media industry
i mean if you get your net cut off, you really think your going to go give money
to the shop on purchases that goes back to the industry who screwed you over? ha
look at the mess creative labs is in world wide now over daniel_k a normal user
making the drivers work for vista OS and creative has stoped all his hard work.
Shops all over the country will not now sell the X-FI creative cards boycotting it.
this happened in just 2 days flat, creatives stock has now fallen 6.7 % in a day!
Next hard-drive makers will go out of business pointless having 1tb or more drives.
pointless even having 600gb or less drives since there is no content to mass store.
optical media companys will also be put out of business no point having burners
or even blank media to store mass content on as backups as their would be nothing
legal to warrant buying or using mass storage since its sole purpose is to “store”
This will then hit graphics card makers, DivX Company and DivX players/hardware.
what legal company or service allows you to downloads DivX format AVI ???
All your mp3 makers will also go out of business as their wont be anyway to
download bare DRM free media Amazon and other Stores will go back to DRM content.
Millions on millions on millions of devices sold world wide will be no longer needed.
they make DivX players in their millions and to this day i fail to see what legal store
you can buy to play your DivX player??? nothing exists but funny enough
companys keep making millions of these players when in reality if you look at it.
all these DivX Content is Pirated content,
Welcome to the World of the Screwed up .. cannot wait
I’m a Virgin Media customer and they are gonna lose my business due to this . I’m sick to death of all these companies trying to destroy people’s civil rights & privacy. all in the name of making a buck. they have No-Right to spy on me, or to sell my usage data to f**cking data-mining marketing companies (another top idea from the virgin posse). Our Government and many just like it all over the world are in the pockets of Corporation’s and it stinks when they bend over backward (for the RIAA MPAA and other mob run frontends) which then leads to ISP’s imposing restrictions on one of the greatest inventions mankind ever created. Until we have complete transparency rooted deeply inside the governing body then they will continue to oppress us however they see fit.
I’d rather pay a freaking £5 tax a month and get to download everything I want then pay a £5 charge so the ISP can implement a big-brother technology that they don’t want to foot the bill for.
Creative Commons / Open Source / Freedom of Information-Sharing FTW!!!!
so what ISP should I go for next… that is the burning question. Wll any ever be OK??? Will the internet be taken down so easily, I feel if it ever gets to that point then the revolution will come knocking so fast the fat-cats won’t have time to take off their smoking jackets and hide the mistress in the wardrobe.
oh and lastly Mr.Afghanistan. You my kind sir are a complete and utter tit. to generalise that all British people are idiots is worthy of a damn good thrashing. I think you’ll find it’s a lot easier saying that it takes stupid (mad & emotional?!) people to let stuff like this happen here in the UK, when in actual fact actually trying to halt policies that are forced in like this thanks to corruption and $$$-hungry bottom-feeders, then you’ll see it’s not as cut&dry.
the new world order dawns. That’s what uneductaed masses have done by tolerating weak-spined greedy stupid puppet politicans
haha misspelled uneducated… irony :)
Just one small question …. does anyone actually know when this will take effect?
does no one read any one elses posts?
http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=news/press/news_content_file_1134.shtml
its NOT happening
Virginmedia (formerly Blueyonder and NTL) has always had free Usenet. Otherwise known as news.blueyonder.co.uk or news.ntlworld.com, with binaries. The only thing that is new is they are changing their servers host, increasing binaries retention and adding more groups. But the fact they offer binaries access is nowhere near ‘new’.
And….
There is no 40mbit tier, planned or otherwise. There is a 50mbit tier that will be offered as a standalone product. It is not an upgrade from 20mbit. Also, there has been no official statement from Virginmedia that this is going to start at all and the BPI has released a press statement saying they have not reached a deal with Virginmedia on this yet. Man this story is so full of holes its not even funny. At least check your sources first Torrentfreak.
http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=news/press/news_content_file_1134.shtml
The blueyonder binary server has been stopped today (1/4/08) and all ex-blueyonder customers are to use news.virginmedia.com .
ex-ntl areas still have their own dedicated server but can access the new server too. They haven’t finalised a date for the ntl migration.
The new server has all the main groups and if you’ve been used to 3 days retention then 7 days is excellent.
If you want to read more on this point your news reader to:
virginmedia.support.usenet
ps the blueyonder text server: text.news.blueyonder.co.uk is unaffected by these changes.
“Virgin Media today played down reports it is planning to cut off subscribers it believes are downloading copyright material illegally.
The Sunday Telegraph said Virgin was working on a pilot with the British Phonographic Institute which could have seen users sent warning letters, suspended and ultimately banned.
The prospect prompted an angry reaction from some subscribers, including on the Digital Spy forums, and came as the government put pressure on service providers to act against pirates.
However, Virgin today said there was no such plan.
“We have not agreed to the three strikes scheme, not started trials with the BPI or any other rights holder, and not decided to snoop on customers and inspect their data,” said a spokesman.
”
Virgin denies this….
Nothing talks like the threat of taking your business elsewhere. If you ISP throttles your P2P activity in any way don’t renew and tell them why.
It’s obvious even rumors are scaring them!
[quote comment="325954"]Nothing talks like the threat of taking your business elsewhere. If you ISP throttles your P2P activity in any way don’t renew and tell them why.
It’s obvious even rumors are scaring them![/quote]
And talking about it publicly can back others in their decision to do the same.
…
I bet the MAFIAA has these sorts of strategies laid out and ready to implement in their drawers. That’s one main weakness of corporations, especially big corporations. They have to plan ahead so they can justify large investments. And because they need to earn money to satisfy their shareholders it’s easy to predict the general direction they have to move in.
I believe it’s better not to put too much stress on the Usenet and keep using bittorrent, even thought it’s more risky for the individual. The evolution of a network of peers is much harder to predict and control than the Usenet. Not to say that the Usenet has not paved the way for other protocols and pioneered P2P. I think the flexibility of a peer network is one major advantage over the five-year plans of the corporations. The content MAFIAA has already lost the initiative to P2P networking and we shoud stay ahead.
Is this the same company that owns Virgin records, airlines, etc.? Is it that billionaire asswipe that comes to America all the time? I hate him, and I woul;d change ISP’s if you can……..
I voluntarily disconnected myself.
I dont get what this UseNet stuff is, but if they are offering something untraceable then thats fine by me.
Also what download amount will make them send out a warning? I have no idea what is considered alot
The listed 7-day binary newsgroup retention most likely only applies to HEADERS.
People who use NZBs will be able to access the full 70-day retention range of Highwinds backend servers.
At least that’s how it is on other ISPs that use highwinds-owned servers for Usenet.
Virginmedia customers need to start responding by downgrading to the cheapest package (2mb I believe)
But like the last BPI involvement, it will peter out and die off
http://www.fileprompt.com
Virgin have offerd free usenet since they started, and they still support telewests usenet service, so its not new.
telewest has a 2 day retention and virgin has a 9 day retention.
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