Thursday October 2, 2008
By Robert Ashton

The first signs that the historic joint memorandum of understanding struck between the BPI, Government and the ISP industry to tackle unlawful filesharing is bearing fruit comes as the six major ISPs begin to send letters to their infringing subscribers.

The July MoU established five key principles to help reduce filesharing over the next two or three years. These included working with Ofcom to find effective ways to deal with repeat offenders and making new legal subscription services.

The fourth principle also committed each ISP – BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali, BT, Orange and Virgin Media are signed up to the MoU – to “put in place a three-month trail to send notifications to 1000 subscribers per week” who have been engaged in illicit uploading or downloading.

The first letters from the ISPs start to go out tomorrow and, although the content differs from ISP to ISP, each contains letters explaining to the customers why they are being written.

In a previous voluntary trial conducted by Virgin Media earlier this year, the letter said: “We’re writing to you about downloading and sharing of copyrighted files on the internet. That’s because we’ve received a report that copyrighted music has been shared using a computer linked to your Virgin Media Internet account.”