The British music and film industries and several UK internet service providers (ISPs) have drawn up an agreement to tackle internet piracy by sending people who download files illegally “escalating” warning letters.
The agreed deal between the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) will be called the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme, or Vcap, and the system will see the creative industries monitor BitTorrent file-sharing networks for infringement, logging pirates’ IP addresses as they go.
These will be tracked back to ISPs who will send out a warning letter, or alert, to the subscriber account associated with the alleged deed. At the moment, the only ISPs to sign up to Vcap are BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin Media, although it is believed that others are likely to join at a later stage.
The deal has been a long time coming, as the Digital Economy Act 2010 was supposed to reduce online piracy but has largely failed to do so. Instead, since then, frustrated rights holders have been trying to negotiate with ISPs to find a voluntary solution to the problem.
Unfortunately, however, even this agreement may not solve it, as the alerts will not tell repeat infringers about possible punitive measures and the programme will also not give the BPI and MPA access to a database of known illegal downloaders, which makes Vcap relatively toothless, legally speaking.
The BPI and MPA have agreed to pay £750,000 towards each ISP to set up the system, or 75 per cent of the total costs, whichever is smaller. Then a further £75,000, or 75 per cent of total costs, will be paid annually by them to cover administration costs.
It is likely that the deal will be finalised soon, with the first warning letters sent out next year. ISPs will keep a record of which accounts receive alerts, and how many, for up to year. The language used in the alerts will escalate in severity but will not contain threats.
However, after four alerts, sent by either email or physical letter, no further action will be taken. There is also a cap of 2.5 million on the total number of alerts that can be sent out in any one year by the ISP collective. This will be adjusted as and when other ISPs join the agreement.