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Be There Unlimited, BPI and Virgin

Last Friday (25 July 2008) we told the story of a bold hero, the BPI, and the knights of the copyright table, BT Retail, BSkyB, CarPhone Warehouse, Tiscali, Orange and of course, Virgin Media. Their mission, to end the evil illegal P2P file sharing that fills our bandwidths and lays waste to our contention ratio. However, the astute among you will have noticed some ISPs did not sign up, the most formidable of which is O2 and ‘Be There Unlimited’.

We have been following the story of Be, who have now become some people’s freedom fighter. In an interesting flag-ship case for the BPI, this is what Be had to say for themselves:

Be welcomes today’s announcement form the BPI that ISPs should engage in communicating the issue of illegal file-sharing to their customers. As Be grows its member base we are getting an increasing number of requests from 3rd parties for information about members who they believe have infringed their copyright or other intellectual property rights. Be has a policy of making it clear to our members of how Be deals with these requests.

Where a content owner (like a record label or a games company) approaches Be and requests the details of a member because of an alleged copyright infringement we will not supply this information direct to the requester unless they have a Court Order. To keep members informed of what’s going on in most circumstances we will try to contact the member in question to make them aware that we have had a request from the rights holder.

Under circumstances when a Court Order is served on Be, which requires us to supply information about member activity, we will comply with the Order and pass the relevant contact information to the rights holder (and in accordance with our Privacy and cookie policy). In this case under most circumstance we will not inform the member that this has occurred as this may compromise the investigation related to the Court Order.

Obviously, loads of people look like that will start using Be as and when they can. Given the nature of the announcement, there will be some room for manoeuvrability for consumers who contracts are coming to an end shortly. Obviously, for those who have recently signed up to a new BT 12 month deal, beware.

Ironically, in the face of these announcements, Virgin media are also hitting back at BT who is claiming 100Mbit connections will be available for many by 2012. Instead, Virgin appears to be fuelling the P2P file sharing debate with a humongous 200Mbit home connection. Just think how many MP3s you could download in an hour with that kind of speed.

After all, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

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