14 DAY TRIAL // As of last week, an agreement has been reached between the BPI, the Motion Picture Association, the UK Government and six major Internet service providers (BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BskyB), agreement that states all of them will work together to fight illegal file sharing. One of the first measures to be taken is to send out warning letters to all the people who are engaged in illegal file sharing activities, an estimated amount of about 6.5 million users.
The purpose of the letters is to inform users that what they are doing represents copyright infringement and is against the law. If about 1 million users were to give up their illegal file sharing ways because of this letter campaign, that would be a significant success.
Over a period of three months, the above mentioned organizations will put the program through its paces and estimate its efficiency. Over this period of time its flaws and drawbacks will come to light, not to mention that the organizations will have more time to figure out what measures to enforce in regard to the users caught sharing copyrighted material. The overall goal would be to reduce online piracy by about 80% in the following 3 years.
One of the sanctions to be implemented is a "three strikes and you're out rule", which means that repeated offenders will be banned from the web. Even if the offender is not cut off completely, the ISPs will set up strong filters that will make it pretty difficult for the user to share any copyrighted material on the web.
Another means of punishing wrongdoers while at the same time allowing them to access the Internet would be by limiting their download speeds.
"We have looked to ISPs to acknowledge their responsibility to help deal with illegal file sharing, engage in communicating the issue to their customers, and put in place procedures necessary to effectively tackle repeated unlawful file sharing. Achieving this would represent a significant step forward and demonstrate clearly the collective will that exists to tackle this serious issue" said a spokesperson for BPI.
According to Mark Mulligan, Vice President of Jupiter Research, in the US, where similar measures have been put in place, the "result has been predominantly one of containment."