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"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. 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 Bonanos See Telegraph article regarding Virgin Media's threatening letters See full text of McGuinness speech from Billboard See April 3 article from BBC News dot.life blog pm TalkTalk's response to ISPs ![]()
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