"
It wasn't me," they all said. Makers of file-sharing applications said they weren't responsible for people stealing music, even though they made it easy to do so. Connectivity providers and Web hosts were just linking people together. The downloaders blamed the uploaders and said they were just taking what was freely available, but "
making available" wasn't illegal either. Whoever it was, it wasn't me.
Now, a day after U2 manager Paul McGuinness
lashed out at ISPs and accused them of complicity in music piracy, U.K. broadband provider Virgin Media
announced that it would join with trade association
British Phonographic Industry in warning customers who are downloading music illegally.
Warning them of what, exactly? We don't know, because the ISP won't cave to BPI's request that it pull the plug on offending customers after three violations. Apparently Virgin will send one letter to "educate" customers, while BPI will send a separate one informing them that they may lose Internet access.
The move follows talk of creating a "music tax," where ISPs compensate the record industry for money lost on pirated music with flat-fee payments, while adding a surcharge to all their consumers' monthly bills (not just the music-stealers'). Virgin's reluctance to directly threaten their own customers gives pause, but they're no longer standing up to BPI the way rival ISP TalkTalk
did in April. (Funny that TalkTalk shares its name with a 1960s garage-rock single by--wait for it--
The Music Machine.)
If the BPI--and by extension,
record labels and the
RIAA--manage to pin the blame for file-sharing on ISPs, or at least cow them into threatening their own customers with disconnection for swapping songs, the precedent could open the door for video content owners and other content providers to "request" the same treatment. But once the ISPs cop to being part of the problem with music piracy, they'll find it hard to say "it wasn't me" to anyone else.
-- Paul BonanosSee Telegraph article regarding Virgin Media's threatening lettersSee full text of McGuinness speech from BillboardSee April 3 article from BBC News dot.life blog pm TalkTalk's response to ISPs
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