I was reading an interesting article from the BBC Technology website this morning. It was regarding Virgin Media sending letters to their customers warning them that they should not be downloading illegal music via file sharing sites.
Apparently the British Phonographic Industry (now known as The BPI) wants all UK Internet Service Providers to sign up to a three strikes policy (where you get two warnings for downloading copyright files and then thrown off the ISP).
Virgin Mediahas started a ten week campaign to “educate” users about downloading copyrighted material and have so far sent out around 800 letters to their customers. What I found really amusing was that the BBC had managed to get Will McGree to talk about how upset he was that he had been sent a letter from Virgin Media, the BBC has a video of the interview here). His entire defence was based on:
- It was an Amy Winehouse track (apparently no-one in his flat listen to that type of music).
- It was downloaded at 8am (obviously students aren’t up at this time).
- He spoke to everyone in his flat and they all said that they didn’t download it.
Usefully he provided a solution to “what must have happened”. Someone must have been outside his flat and used his wireless network to download the file. Erm, yeah, because I find people outside my house at 8am downloading one Amy Winehouse track all the time. My god, DON”T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH LIKE A FIVE YEAR OLD YOU SOUND, YOU IDIOT. Of course, the fact that you haven’t even protected your wireless network shows that you have the technical ability of a newt and that you’ll never really understand how Virgin Media know exactly where you go on the net every second that you spend on it (yes, that means your porn as well), and can probably tell you exactly which computer in your flat it was downloaded to.
You were caught, SUCK IT UP, and stop embarrassing yourself!
