Broadband News

After BT made the claim that getting tough on Internet piracy would cost around £1 million per day, the body representing the music industry has launched a counter-offensive. BPI boss Geoff Taylor says broadband companies have seen their revenues rising while those of the record business have gone the opposite way because of piracy - and that the ISP's stance is "just about protecting profits."

Newspaper The Mirror has emerged as an unlikely battleground in a war of words between senior BT and BPI figures - with the latter now having launched a counter-attack. "It's shameful for a company like BT to know that a high percentage of the traffic it carries is illegal material but do nothing," Taylor told the paper. "If you operate a commercial service and know it is being used to break the law, taking steps to ensure it is used legally is a cost of doing business."

The problem is that there's a difference between knowing laws are being broken and identifying who's been breaking those laws. Tracking the IP addresses of suspected pirates - which is what various law firms resort to - is known to be notoriously unreliable, and may not provide legally solid evidence (it's too hard to prove who was using a particular IP address when it could have been hacked, spoofed or even just shared). And this means there was an obvious counterargument for BT to make: "Many peer to peer applications are perfectly legal, such as World of Warcraft and BBC iPlayer," a mysterious spokesperson said. "To investigate the exact nature of each case would involve an intrusive level of inspection of people's traffic and customers would rightly complain."

The telecommunications company's view on the record industry has previously been summed up another one of its interchangeable spokespeople: “At the moment, they just want to outsource all their problems to ISPs," he says. But, as reported here, it was someone with an actual name - John Petter, the firm's consumer division boss - that drew first blood. “They’ve lobbied hard and very effectively but that doesn’t make them right,” he said. “Their claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense."

The ironic thing was that Petter launched his assault along with a volley of equally "melodramatic" claims of his own. His headline-grabbing view was that clamping down on piracy in the way the Government is proposing - with ISPs playing a greater role in identifying file-sharers and eventually disconnecting persistent offenders - would cost around £365 million per year for internet service providers and subsequently, on average, £24 a year for each consumer.

That's given BPI boss Taylor the opportunity to argue that BT's been exaggerating the amount of money involved - and only cares about its own profits. However, a statement from BT obtained by our friends at ISPreview says it has been willing to co-operate at its own cost - but only up to a point:-

BT and other ISPs agreed to send 1,000 notifications alleging copyright infringement a week for a 12-week trial period, with BT picking up the bill for this activity for our own customers as an act of goodwill. However, it was understood that at the end of this period, we would need to take stock and have further discussions with the rights holders about costs etc.

During this period, the BPI sent us around 21,000 alleged cases, but less than two-thirds proved to be properly matched to an IP address of a BT customer and not a duplicate, so this could indicate that the true extent of this activity is much lower than the 100,000 number the BPI claim since February. In addition since none of the customers we wrote to during the trial were subsequently taken to court by the BPI, we don't know whether they were actually guilty of infringement.

At the moment, only one thing seems clear: all this BPI-BT bickering in The Mirror isn't necessarily reflecting well on either party.