Apparently, the wife had a phone call from Virgin Media who is our ISP, to say that we have been downloading music.
The funny thing is, nobody in our household has been downloading music in the last .. at least 4 months, so where they get the idea that just because you download something through P2P means it’s illegal and is therefore music, I don’t know. I’m not sure if US TV programs fall under one of the categories that BPI covers, but if not, what can they do about it if I decided to use a torrent client to download something that isn’t music?
Or, what if I downloaded legal music via torrent? Are they going to call again and send out a second warning because I’ve been using peer-to-peer technology legally? I’m not the first and they’re apparently calling various others that have been using P2P, whether legally or not, so this is where things are going to get interesting. If they could give me a time and/or date of when I was ‘caught’ using peer-to-peer technology (and I’m guessing it was within the last week or two), I could tell them what I downloaded.
Is this going to affect programs that use P2P legally? Programs like xfire use a peer-to-peer distribution method, so if I download a demo or something through the service and then that demo is ‘distributed’ by me, will VM contact us again to say that they’ve detected such activity?
They don’t know what I’ve downloaded and the only thing I can figure is that they base it on the fact you use a torrent program to download something, regardless of what it is you download and if that’s the case, many customers aren’t going to be happy and will migrate to another service where they don’t have such a stupid regime. If they base it on the tracker used, well that’s just plain retarded since, funnily enough, even The Pirate Bay has some legal torrents.