| How will they handle false positives? The BPI has teams of technicians to trace illegal music downloading to individual accounts. It will hand these account numbers over to Virgin Media, which will match them to names and addresses.
The model being pushed by the BPI is for a letter warning customers they are committing an offence, followed by suspension of internet access for a second infringement, and finally disconnection.
So what happens if they falsely identify traffic as pirated material when it isn't? It's not like the music industry has a perfect track record of identifying pirates.
I can see it now, Jim Pirate downloads a pirated song, but the BPI transposes some digits on the IP address. Joe User gets the warning notice. He figures a mistake was made, means to contact his ISP, but quickly forgets about it. Jim Pirate downloads another song and Joe User is blamed again. This time Joe User finds his connection suspended. He calls to complain but they won't believe him that he isn't a dirty, stinkin' pirate. Now Joe User has to live in fear that Jim Pirate will download again and get him (Joe User) kicked offline.
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-Jason Levine
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