Virgin Media and the British Polyphonic Industry will work together to "educate" broadband customers on avoiding legal action while downloading music with peer-to-peer software, the organizations said Friday.
A joint release posted on the British Polyphonic Industry (BPI) Web site said Virgin Media broadband customers using their accounts to illegally share music will receive letters from Virgin Media and the BPI. Customer names and addresses will not be disclosed to the BPI--which is comparable to the Recording Industry Association of America--and the release says the letters will be of an "informative" nature.
According to the BPI, the new campaign will provide advice on how to prevent misuse and find legal online sources of downloadable music, and it will also illustrate the potential dangers of downloading illicit files. Virgin Media said its broadband is a great platform for people to download music, but it wants "them to do so without infringing rights of musicians and music companies."
The educational information will also be posted on the Virgin Media Web site.
The BPI said research concludes that 6.5 million broadband accounts in the U.K. are used to access music without permission. Virgin Media, a cable, Internet, phone, and cell phone provider, is part of the larger Virgin Group. The company has 10 million customers total, and is the most popular residential broadband provider in the U.K., according to its Web site.
BPI CEO Geoff Taylor suggested that new partnerships with Internet service providers would reduce illegal downloading and said the partnership with Virgin Media was the first step toward reaching that goal.
In March, British technology Web site The Register said that Virgin Media and BPI were in talks to implement a three-strikes program through which users would be warned of their illicit activities before their service was cut off. But instead the education plan has been employed.
The Register claims to have examples of the Virgin Media letter (PDF) and the BPI letter (PDF) that will be sent to copyright-infringing users during the campaign's two-month trial period.
Jammie Thomas
UPDATE: Jammie Thomas is going to have to sell a lot more thongs.
Thomas, the woman ordered by a federal court in October to pay the recording industry $222,000 for pirating music, doesn't have enough money to fund an upcoming appeal and has been forced to look for a new lawyer, according to her current attorney, Brian Toder.
Thomas was the first person sued by the recording industry for copyright violations to argue a case before a jury and was found to have illegally shared 24 digital-music files.
Toder, who represented Thomas in the civil case, told CNET News.com on Wednesday that handling her appeal on a pro bono basis would be too expensive. Thomas has been selling merchandise, such as T-shirts, coffee mugs, and women's underwear, as well as accepting donations, to help raise money for her defense. But the fund-raising efforts have "actually raised very little," Toder said.
"I'm very confident she will find representation," Toder added. "There are many passionate organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), chomping on the bit to help her."
The other good news for Thomas is that the music labels have agreed to waive their lawyer fees, Toder said. After winning a judgment against Thomas, the record companies could have required her to pay their legal costs.
Toder said that because one of the plaintiffs, Virgin Records, was forced to dismiss its part of the case on the day of trial, Thomas was therefore entitled to attorneys fees from Virgin. Toder used that to negotiate with the rest of the plaintiffs and they agreed not to seek fees.
That Toder was not going to handle Thomas' appeal came as news to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the EFF, which advocates for the rights of Internet users and has offered support to Thomas in the past. He said the group would most certainly try to help Thomas when the time came but that he couldn't guarantee anything.
"We've helped lots of people caught in the music industry's litigation campaign to find counsel," von Lohmann said. "But I can't say we've succeeded in every case. It's easier for me to find lawyers in San Francisco and New York than it is in Minnesota...If people think we're out there backstopping every lawsuit, they need to donate a lot more money."
Thomas' case, however, has several things going for it, von Lohmann said.
"There is a strong basis for an appeal based on the jury instruction," von Lohmann said. "There's been a lot of speculation that (Thomas) is guilty, but the thing to keep in mind on appeal is that it's not whether the jury got the facts right. It's about whether the right legal standards were applied. A lot of copyright attorneys think the jury instructions were erroneous."
Thomas won't be able to file her appeal until a federal district judge in Minnesota decides on a motion to reduce the jury award. The $222,000 award violates the Constitution, Toder said.
The blog TorrentFreak was first to report that Thomas is looking for a new attorney.
The Recording Industry Association of America has already mounted a court challenge against XM Satellite Radio over gadgets like the Pioneer Inno that allow consumers to trap individual songs originally played on air in alleged violation of copyright.
Now the industry group is urging that issue to be one of the deciding factors for federal regulators weighing the proposed multibillion-dollar union of XM and its sole competitor, Sirius Satellite radio.
In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, the RIAA urged the agency to "make clear that its approval of a merger is conditioned upon the continued protection of sound recordings from unlawful infringement."
Under copyright law, separate licenses exist for the "performance" of a song and for the recording or "distribution" of it. Satellite and Internet radio broadcasters (unlike traditional radio) are already required to pay performance-based royalties.
But the RIAA said it's concerned that both satellite radio companies have invested in technologies that allow them to shortchange artists on the distribution side "by giving users the ability to download copyrighted sound recordings to portable devices, effectively transforming a radio-like service into a digital distribution subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster."
A merger could bolster those investments and "seriously threaten the viability of the music industry as a whole," the RIAA wrote. The group also called on the FCC to require the merged companies to pay higher royalty rates in general to the record industry, arguing the firms are "no longer new, struggling companies" that can get away with paying what it called "below-market rates."
The RIAA has already earned some U.S. senators' blessings this year for a bill that would impose new limits on the broadcasters, including a requirement that they cloak their streams with copy-protection technology, but the proposal hasn't gone anywhere yet.
XM and consumer advocacy groups that have come to its defense insist that the devices in question don't violate copyright law because they operate within a listener's home recording and fair use rights.
The RIAA's comments came on the final day for submitting comments about the public-interest implications of the XM-Sirius deal in general. As of this blog post, more than 5,000 comments had been posted to the FCC's online database. According to a press release distributed Monday afternoon by a firm representing the radio companies, more than 3,500 of those comments came from individuals supporting the deal.
The FCC is still accepting comments for at least another month on a more specific question: whether, if it finds the XM-Sirius deal is hunky-dory for the public, it should waive a decade-old rule prohibiting a single operator from controlling all of the satellite radio spectrum.
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