Virgin/BPI letters arrive, student freeloaders object

Following the announcement a few weeks ago (see here) that Virgin Media would be sending out warning letters to some of their broadband customers, 800 of these letters have now been sent out across the UK. As reported on the Register and the BBC (here and here), one student customer has objected publicly about being labelled an Amy Winehouse fan, as the letter he received alleged that a track by the pop star was found to be linked to his internet account and he complained that he wasn't even a fan of her music.

(right: Merpel nervously receives her letters from Virgin Media)

This Kat heard the student in question on this morning's Today programme (sounding quite smug about all the publicity he has generated), and it sounded very much like there was a clear (perhaps deliberate?) misconception about what the letters allege. Unless the IPKat is very much mistaken, the allegations relating to file sharing are at the moment all about section 20(2) of the CDPA, which makes "the making available to the public of the work by electronic transmission in such a way that members of the public may access it from a place and at a time individually chosen by them" an infringing act. This is important because downloading itself, which everyone seems to be talking about, is not in itself an infringing act (although one could argue that the copy thereby created on your computer would be infringing). The act that the BPI are relying on is instead is that of making files available for others to download, which they can check by seeing which IP address is hosting which files. The IPKat finds it hard to imagine how a user cannot realise that their computer is set up for doing this, as it has to be done deliberately, and can only agree with the approach so far taken by Virgin and the BPI. This is, after all, a far cry from the heavy-handed approach taken by the US RIAA, which has resulted in some very bad press over the last few years.