Virgin Media will cooperate with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) in a pilot to track down users downloading illegally:
“The BPI has teams of technicians to trace illegal music downloading to individual accounts. It will hand these account numbers over to Virgin Media, which will match them to names and addresses.”
You might think that there will be an exodus of users from Virgin Media to other ISPs and that this will hurt Virgin Media but I doubt that.
You see, there are many ISPs in the UK that are offering an “unlimited” service for an ever decreasing monthly fee.
Users that use P2P often use the most of the ISP’s bandwidth so this pact with BPI is a great excuse for Virgin Media to dump those costly users.
In addition if they manage to switch the downloads from public internet to a Usenet server inside their network they avoid most bandwidth charges and capacity problems.
It’s a win/win for Virgin Media (and lose/lose for their customers)!
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