BT rejects BPI piracy attacks

BT has rejected an attack from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) regarding its approach to illegal filesharing.

The telecoms giant has said that demands from the BPI that it investigate a list of alleged pirates would require an unjustifiable level of intrusion into web traffic.

BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor told The Mirror: "It's shameful for a company like BT to know that a high percentage of the traffic it carries is illegal material but do nothing.

"If you operate a commercial service and know it is being used to break the law, taking steps to ensure it is used legally is a cost of doing business. This is just about BT protecting profits."

However, a BT spokesman told ISPreview that the firm and other service providers had agreed to pay for and send 1,000 notifications alleging copyright infringement every week only for 12-week period, but were deluged by 21,000 cases from the BPI.

He said: "Less than two-thirds proved to be properly matched to an IP address of a BT customer and not a duplicate, so this could indicate that the true extent of this activity is much lower than the 100,000 number the BPI claim since February.

"In addition, since none of the customers we wrote to during the trial were subsequently taken to court by the BPI, we don't know whether they were actually guilty of infringement."

He added: "We definitely do not know the extent of illegal file sharing on our network. Many peer to peer applications are perfectly legal, such as World of Warcraft, BBC iPlayer and Skype.

"To investigate the exact nature of each peer-to-peer packet would involve an intrusive level of inspection of people's traffic and customers would rightly complain about BT infringing their privacy where we to do it."