If you are suspected of pirating copyrighted material, then be prepared to receive a strongly worded letter geared at educating you to the pitfalls of being a pirate on the great blue web.

According to the Daily Tech Whip, BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk have signed a deal with the music and movie industries whereby the ISPs will send out “educational” missives to pirates from next year.



The plan seems to have opened a can of worms, as pointed out by ISPReview, suspected pirates would be identified by their IP address (e.g. through monitoring public P2P File Sharing activity) and notify the ISP, which would then send a letter or email “alert” (warning) to the user.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) questioned what personal information might be used, who will have access to it, what standards of evidence would be adopted in order to help identify customers whom are suspected of Internet copyright infringement (piracy), will there be an appeals process and would whole homes / shared networks face sanctions on their connectivity if a pirate is identified.