Friday, July 25, 2008

Government p2p target: cut illegal file sharing by 70-80%

Following the widely reported deal between big UK ISPs and the music industry, it seems that the government is keen to cut down on copyright infringement via p2p networks by 70-80%. (Thanks to Glyn at ORG for the link).

If you want a sensible analysis of the implications of the deal though, forget the mass media and head over to Pangloss.

"So what does the MoU say? Well basically for 3 months, the industry aided by the 6 ISPs involved are going to send out letters to suspected filesharers. Lots and lots of letters. 80,000 or so over 12 weeks. But hang on. If 67% of the UK have admitted to filesharing - even only once - that's 35 million letters that need sending out. Quite a bit of scaling up there to be done after the pilot. Eco-wise let's hope they're all emails:)

But letters is only stage 1 (after all the BPI could have sent them themselves, tho this way they do aparently get ISPs to pay for half of them.) Stage 2 is what do you do next, when presumably they compare them all on a big spreadsheet, and find that eg Mr A of Aberystwyth got 220 letters from 5 ISPs? What gets done to persuade Mr A to abandon his bad ways if the shock of 220 letters isn't enough?"

Read it in full.

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