Can you imagine the scene down the pub: "Well, lads, I got disconnected from BT's broadband today."

"Jaysus, what for? Movies? Warez? Porn?"

"Err, no, actually, it was Girls Aloud."

*Barely suppressed snorts of derision*

But then I suspect that anyone sharing Girls Aloud would be too young to be in a pub...

Was the user illegally sharing music?

So BT's customers have to comply with the law, but BT doesn't (i.e. Phorm)?

Maybe BT customers should send a similarly-worded letter to them, threatening disconnection without compensation.

Even if the copyright argument is accepted, warning folk off one at a time is going to have as much effect as King Canute has on the tide. Besides if folk want to share music collections with friends, they don't need an Internet to do so.

However, if someone has already GOT the CD, they have a license to listen to the music.

That's what they keep telling us.

Tell you what, BPI, I will pass on all the profits I receive to you. And I'll give another 10% to charity out of my own pocket.

Can't say fairer than that.

vote with your feet and leave BT. They're shite anyway.

... especially since BT bundled FON with many of their routers by default. Surely a FON user could hop onto any of the nodes listed here : http://www.beta.bt.com/apps/openwifi/secure/hotspots.do and torrent away.

...now illegal?

<quote>

1. Remove any P2P filesharing software from any computer(s)

</quote>

I use filesharing software for perfectly legitimate reasons - such as sharing documents with family and friends that are too large for email attachments. It strikes me that the "recommendations" are designed to scare the unknowing into complying with the usual mafia actions we read about with the MPAA and RIAA.

we have one story that says BT are sending out letters to people about file sharing

And another story about legal P2P file sharing by the end of the year by paying your ISP (BT Perhaps) a premuim for what you are essentially getting a letter about now

Talk about pissing off your customer

<quote>

Because I am trying to get out of my contract with them and avoid having to pay the outstanding balance in full.

So this is the way to do it, huh?

Thanks for the tip.

</quote>

Sorry Greg, but in TFA, BT were quoted thus:

"Sorry, but we're obliged to point out that further similar problems may have to lead to the termination of your account, as such activity contravenes BT's Acceptable Use Policy. Please note that, should your account be closed as a result of contravention of BT's Acceptable Use Policy, you will still have to pay any sums owing under the terms of your contract with us."

in the states the RIAA would have been trying to screw her totaly so its better than that.

Oh and as said there are legal uses for P2P I for one downloaded UBD as a torrent these ways its a good way of reducing server costs for open source and such

it's only "recommended" you remove filesharing apps, and if we assume the clueless demographic, that makes the most sense. The geek demographic can presumably remove the copyrighted stuff without going to that extreme (or will, more probably, simple switch ISP :P )

@bertie bassett:

This is why BPI and ISPs are going down this route. If the BPI were to sue people they'd need to prove those things in a court of law. You don't need to a court of law for an ISP to kick someone off for AUP violation. This would be a concern if there weren't so many ISPs :) ( it actually may be a concern for me, coz I'm on cable, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it)

of course simply identifying the filename means _nothing_ if i decide to put a jog image onto a filesharing network, a picture of my garden say, that is called "james_blunt_xxxx.zip" where xxx is a song title. does this prove anything, other than my inability to pick helpful filenames?

now if the user is filesharing, I'd take this as a sign to move over to something that works over TOR or similar, but if not personally I'd put a letter, recorded delivery, to the head office requesting to see the actual evidence, pointing out I'd need to know if the contents of the file were in fact subject to copyright.

and if they wrote back to say they did identify the file as copyright I'd laugh, or if they identified it correctly I'd enquire as to why they had _illegally_ intercepted a transmission.

perfectly simple to start using spoof file names, of course this does little for honey pot sites but for BT intercepts..

don't agree with copyright infringment as such, but agree with the BPI even less

As the BPI are not getting your details and the ISP is dealing with the matter internally, they are committing commercial suicide. As pointed out, hardcore sharers can block detection and casual downloaders if cut off will just move to another ISP by which time they will have wised up and gen up on how not to get caught. The only loser being the ISP that cooperates who will lose business both departing customers and others avoiding them.

As Ive mentioned before in a previous thread, it is futile trying to hit p2p when people at work/school/college can pass around 1TB HDs stuffed full of music or burning MP3 DVDs. Putting it in context, when the majors were having kittens over Napster, when it closed it only had 3-4TB and much of that was duplicates.

Dont know why I just thought about it but while a kid in the 70s my parents ran a pub. One day some busybody from either the BPI or Performing Rights Soc came in asking if my mum had a license to play music from the radio/cassette in public. She simply picked up the radio from behind the bar, moved it to the cellar next door, turned up the volume and left the door open. The radio was now being played in private, the fact it could be heard in public was incidental. In all the device had moved little more than 3ft. He gave up and walked off :-)

I'm not sure how they would successfully enforce a "three strikes" scheme. Surely, if the ISP didn't want to lose custom, they could just deny any correlation between alleged violations, i.e. every complaint made by the BPI is matched to a "first offender". The ISP doesn't have to give details on the user without a court order, so how would the BPI know otherwise?

Does that include the BBC iplayer?

...or would a filename be absolutely no proof of the existence of copyright material being shared? Calling a file RipOffGirlsAloudWailing.mp3 does not make it so.

A file name is independent of the file contents - only the filetype is important in some OEs.

You can call a Girls Aloud track what you want but it still doesn't make it music.

Not a very popular opinion, but I think this might be a good thing. A good proportion of copyright infringement is done by "da youth" who aren't evil or malicious but simply sharing and getting a few things for free, which is a good thing when you have little to no disposable income.

These warnings would remove some of the anonymity provided by the internet (at least the perceived anonymity) which is the principle reason for breaking the law. It's not unreasonable for BPI and the people they represent to protect their interest, and warning people that they may be in breach of the law, seems fair and financially good idea for the BPI as going to court isn't cheap and they are unlikely to take anyone to court who could afford their over evaluated losses.

Dangers arise from false accusations, but with multiple warnings that's some what reduced as long as people who's lax security (their own doing or their ISP home setup) is corrected.

At the end of the day, if your torrenting copyrighted material you are breaking the law. Of course the police aren't going to check up on you, but if the copyright holder choose to, then expect your warning.

Let BPI waste their time hunting down teenagers and getting ISP to dispatch warning letter. Their vain hopes that they can transmute pirate copies into real sales, and if they can stop piracy in an instant and fail to see the massive spike in retail sales, they might just look at other business models. Right now it easier to blame the devil than themselves.

This has been happening for at least 12 months! Why has it taken so long to come to light???

oh, wait - I'll tell you why.

The "Customer Security Team", aka the Abuse Dept, is hugely under funded and supported. I shall pause for a moment as you all take a deep breath of astonishment.

...

"Eddie Mackay" (Hi, Eddie, long time no speak. When did you get permission to change your name? Or have El Reg been nice to you?) is the only person in BT who deals with BPI matters.

One person. One. And he's not even employed by BT, but by an agency who pay him less than you'd get for flipping non-identifiable meat at Macdonalds.

Filesharers of the BT world - don't panic! Eddie must get hundreds of such reports per month but, due to inefficiency, RUBBISH computer systems* and a focus on CS rather than the actual issues which the BT Abuse team should be dealing with (I was chastised for not apologising, to a blatant spammer, for upsetting him. Don't even get me started on the apology thing - BT is a "sorry" company, and has been for at least three years), he can only deal with 20 or so per week.

So relax.

====================================================

* how do they tie a dynamic IP to a customer? They have script(s) written by some student in the 1990's which untars a zipped logfile of DHCP assignations, then greps through them to find out which CLI had which IP address at which time.

Generally, the team search through a 24 hour period. Frequent error messages I've seen indicate that each tarball covers a 1 hour period... and contains DHCP changes for each and every customer in the country who connected/disconnected within that period. With the amount of customers they have, that's a lot of changes. And I have it on good authority that the computer responsible for running this script is inthe P2, or less, range.

This would be barely workable in a small ISP, or perhaps an internal network, but in the biggest ISP in the country? Each search takes approximately 30 minutes. When the machine is working, which it very often isn't. Possibly cos the cleaners unplugged it so they could use their hoover.

I kid you not.

Eddie can do about 10 "BPI complaints" per day, at a guess. So twenty is possibly a bit low. 40 per week? Maybe?

=====================================================

Why am I disclosing all of this? Because I'm still LIVID at the way they treated me and my colleagues as employees of Manpower.

Also because they didn't have the gumption to get me to sign an NDA.

Interesting to hear how they still treat/resource their staff.

Back round about 1998 I remember there was a wonderful site at the address www.ihateBT.?? - think it might have been dot.nl. Anyway, the site was set up by a former BT engineer who wrote he'd been unfairly dismissed for "merely asking" if it were possible to reverse engineer some technology BT had. His, ahem, let's be careful here, "allegations" about the company and, in particular, the BT Security department and their antics when phone-tapping their own staff made for interesting reading.

As a customer, I dropped BT years ago. I've blocked out the memories of the many things they did to me but I still have a Pavlovian gag-reaction when I see the logo. So good to hear they're still on form. I'm astonished they've still got the market share they have.

Who's up for going round with some pitchforks and torches?

There they take your work, and replace the revenue stream you may get from the adverts with their own. That is piracy, and passing off. They also subvert security, by having a tap, and that can include credit card details, and with the recent SSL weak key problem, a lot of that data could now be accessible.

They are making money off the copyrighted work of others, and making security on the web a nightmare.

I have been blocking btcentralplus for a while now, but the reverse lookups can slow the system down a bit for other users. So, time to work out the IP blocks they are using.

Their nameservers are in the 217.33 to 27.35 range, BT seems to kick in at around 217.32 and they seem to go up to 217.47 ( we end up in Africa by 217.77 :) ).

Well let's see what happens if the range 217.32 to 217.47 gets blocked.

They have some in the 193.113 range for bt.com, would be rude to not include the corporate folks as well, seems just to be 193.113 there.

Good a lot nippier.

Deny from 217.32 217.33 217.34 217.35 217.36

Deny from 217.37 217.38 217.39 217.40 217.41 217.42

Deny from 193.113

It wouldn't surprise me if the bittorrents didn't start doing some blocking as well, some users ISPs are pretty bad for them to have dealings with. Might just clear a lot of problems up, and reduce the number of copyright infringements. Then the kids can get back to pestering mum and dad for pocket money to buy the latest pop music travesties.

Sounds pretty fair to me, BPI tells BT of a customer breaking their acceptable use policy. These rules are pretty well laid out when you sign up. BT tells customer off and gives them a get out clause in case they are daft enough to have an unsecured connection.

No one is being sued or taken to court, no 'proof' is required.

What's all the fuss about?

Absolutely. One of their golden rules of customer care is "apologise when possible, not when necessary"

Sadly "Fix the damn problem" isn't on the list.