neepheid and savannah both let us know that The British Phonographic Industry has accused British Internet Service Provider BT (British Telecommunications) of not doing enough to stop illegal music file-sharing over the internet:
The British Phonographic Industry said the telecoms giant had been reluctant to discuss the issue of online piracy, despite repeated attempts by its anti-piracy division to get BT to discuss peer-to-peer file-swapping. BT denies it is supporting illegal services, pointing out that peer-to-peer technology is not illegal. |
"BT is the biggest service provider in terms of peer-to-peer traffic but getting them to discuss the issues is like pulling teeth," said Jollyon Benn of the BPI's anti-piracy unit. "BT is trying to create business links with the music industry at the same time as being completely intransigent to the issues of piracy," he said.
BT has recently launched Dotmusic, an online service offering users unlimited downloads from a catalogue of 150,000 music tracks for a monthly fee of £9.99. BT is also the largest user of peer-to-peer bandwidth, although all other ISPs also allow users access to such services.
Other British ISPs have taken action to deal with p2p services, largely because they are having problems supporting the massive bandwidth being used by such networks. This move has proved massively unpopular and BT has no plans to go down the same route. Read the complete article here.
Source: BBC News
