Virgin Media: ‘Absolutely No Possibility’ of Disconnecting File-Sharers
Written by enigmax on July 03, 2008Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is “absolutely no possibility” that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry.
As the war of words over file-sharing in the UK heats up, the music industry represented by the BPI has been seeking ways to stop an estimated 6 million British citizens from sharing music. It has been pressurizing ISPs to take responsibility for the actions of their subscribers, and demanding that they disconnect those who share unauthorized music, something the ISPs don’t want to do.
To its credit, one ISP, Carphone Warehouse, has refused to comply. Others are working with the music industry and at the forefront of that group is Virgin Media.
Virgin has been receiving quite a lot of bad publicity recently after it was revealed that it agreed to work with the music industry to send out so-called ‘educational warnings‘ to its customers the BPI accuse of file-sharing. Virgin has sent out hundreds of these at the behest of the music industry and they have been dropping through mail boxes up and down the country. The letters come in an envelope and printed on the outside are the words: “Important: If you don’t read this, your broadband could be disconnected” so recipients could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that, frankly, if they don’t read it, their broadband could be disconnected.
However, Virgin Media told has told Jim over at Newsbeat that the printing on the envelope was “a mistake” and there is “absolutely no possibility” of legal action or disconnection for any recipient of these letters. Nice to know.
Furthermore, Asam Ahmad from Virgin notes that they cannot be 100% sure that the person they send the letters to has actually committed any offense at all. “It is important to let our customers know that their accounts have been used in a certain way but we are happy to accept it may not be the account holder that’s involved.”
He goes on to highlight the problematic issue of incorrectly accusing someone due to a lack of solid evidence: “It could be someone else in the family or someone living in a shared house. It could even be someone stealing wi-fi. We are not making any form of accusation.”
Virgin Media has also stated that it will not hand over the personal details of anyone accused by the BPI “under any circumstances”. This is a good start by Virgin and all credit to them for taking this stance but the reality is that Virgin hands over its subscriber’s details in the blink of an eye when faced with a court order to do so. We know for a fact that they hand over the details of petty file-sharers to the likes of lawyers Davenport Lyons for the alleged sharing of one cheap game costing little more than a single album. However, the BPI has said in the past that it doesn’t want to start taking legal action against individuals.
Previously: ‘Heroes’ Producer Recognizes Benefits of BitTorrent
Next: Indiana Gregg to The Pirate Bay: The Internet Police Are Coming
84 Responses
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Woop Woop, first post. Congrats to Virgin for this if only all ISPs grew a back bone like Carphone Warehouse…
i don’t trust them at all! however like a lot of cable customers in the uk, we have no other choice but to use them :(
they denied the disconnection rumours when they were in talks with the bpi.
they denied the disconnection threats when they had sent out the threatening letters.
I wonder if they will deny it when they start disconnecting people.
‘the disconnection of these individuals had nothing to do with a deal with the bpi’ etc
Hmmmm…is Virgin growing some backbone or are they just trying to break the flood of bad PR and trying to stop people leaving / singing up with someone else…..
Virgin have suffered from bad PR since they bought NTL. I wonder if Richard Branson intervened yesterday?
I think SxC is on to something.. !
I guess they have to say that they will not disconnect anyone or they would lose even more paying customers than they are already.
Sitting down and having a chat with the BPI has really had a bad effect on their business. Perhaps they need to cut their dealings with so-called “rights owners” and concentrate on shoring up their own business.
Yeh, you can see Virgin has done a double back, or a testing of the waters shall we say, realising it’s below zero freezing…
And it’s a good thing to… Now all we need to do is stop stuff like Phorm and we can ride the rest of this war out.
get peer guardian then they wont find u
@ Jul 03, 2008 at 12:04 by Anonymous
You have NO idea!
Virgin has had bad PR, but it keeps shooting itself in the foot. It can’t even print up envelopes without getting the wording inaccurate.
Who’d trust an “educational warning” from a company that doesn’t know if it’s coming or going? Methinks the poor users of the service could teach the company how to run itself.
The virgin bosses are the ones who need an educational warning.
VM are nothing but cockroaches. If I had a BT line (or £125 to spend on a BT line installation), I would have left them ages ago. As per #2, I am stuck with them….
U S A
U S A
U S A
Ha Ha, we dont have to deal with shitty ISP’s like VM, WE GOT COMCAST BITCHES!!! HA!!
Oh wait….
too much money in one pile. be careful plz
Comcast isn’t that great man.
Comcastmustdie.com
pretty sure he was being sarcastic about comcast you tool
I bet Virgin is going to do what 3 said and disconnect people anyways
at 12:04 by Anonymous
What world do you live in?
All peer guardian does is block the IP addresses of KNOWN forces of darkness.
If they log on with any machine through an ISP assigning dynamic ip addresses they won’t be blocked, they then join in a swarm and can note all ip addresses in the swarm AND YOUR BUSTED.
There is no absolute foolproof way of not getting caught, at best you try to keep under the radar.
Virgin are blatantly just stalling to ease the PR situation. At the moment it seems that they are still monitoring and sending out letters, as before, but for now they just aren’t acting on them.
Well, FFS, how long will it be until they decide to START acting on them?
This isn’t much of a victory to my mind. This is just their PR making promises, and likely has little impact on what Virgin will actually do in future.
“There is no absolute foolproof way of not getting caught, at best you try to keep under the radar.”
VPN tunneling is a short term solution, so is WASTE (Mac, Win & Linux) but much harder to configure small network. SSL too, but i think that will be the first place that will cave to any subpoena as its based in the US.
torrents are here to stay!!!
What? Sorry?
I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome it is having your line maxed out by leeching DVDRs from Virgin’s free binary usenet access.
“Virgin have suffered from bad PR since they bought NTL. I wonder if Richard Branson intervened yesterday?”
Virgin did not buy NTL, NTL/Telewest brought the rights to the name when they got Virgin mobile.
This company is full of lies, I wouldn’t believe anything they tell anyone. So glad we have Sky/.be coming to my house soon!
“VPN tunneling is a short term solution, so is WASTE (Mac, Win & Linux) but much harder to configure small network. SSL too, but i think that will be the first place that will cave to any subpoena as its based in the US.”
This is true to a certain extent, and with the use of anonymous proxy’s.
I have a contact in BT’s data centre who have successfully traced packets through VPN’s and anonymous proxy’s to the end user’s ip address.
At the present time it is very time consuming and requires an awful lot of number crunching, and as such they will only actively carry out the procedure if really pushed, and certainly not on a routine basis.
Hence my comment about staying under the radar.
I was extremely sceptical of this until I agreed to do a p2p download (of non-copyrighted material of course), I used an isp who assigned me a dynamic ip address, and an high-anonymous proxy server. The download took less than 3 mins.
I was later shown a list of IP addresses in the swarm which listed amongst them the anonymous proxy server address I had used (as expected).
I was then shown a second list (how it was generated I was not told) and the dynamic ip address and ISP I had used was amongst those listed.
How they did it I’ve got absolutely no idea, but they said it would also work with VPN’s.
Dont trust em, its a trap, simple as that.
i’m glad i’m with Carphone Warehouse. although i don’t think it’ll last. we’ve just got to wait until BPI offer them enough money to bribe them to go after file sharers
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