Virgin Media ISP and the British Photographic Institute (BPI) have begun sending out a fresh batch of letters to customers who they suspect are participating in the unauthorized downloading of music and movies.
These customers will receive an ‘informative correspondence” from both Virgin and the BPI which will “educate them on how to safely download music without being at risk of legal action.”
The BPI, unlike other organizations like the RIAA, does not believe in suing users before they have at least received ample warnings, and acknowledges that some of the unauthorized downloads may have been done without the owners knowledge or consent. Unsecured wireless, children, and other family members using the computer without owner knowledge were the reasons given.
Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, added: ‘Education is absolutely key to reducing the extent of illegal downloading and we are pleased to be working with Virgin Media on this campaign.’
The BPI however also notes that anyone who receives several warnings but “continues to offend” will have their Internet account cut off by the ISP and face legal consequences.
Result for: how to
The video-sharing site YouTube has added new stipulations to its community guidelines, this time banning terrorist training and ‘drug abuse’ videos.
However, the entire system will be based on users reporting videos that infract the new guidelines. This will of course be an impossible task, judging by the fact that 13 hours of new video are uploaded every 5 minutes to the site.
An AP report showed that the battle will be an uphill climb as there was at least 10 videos available using a quick search that showed how to make bombs.
The new guidelines specifically bans videos “that incite others to commit violent acts, videos on activities such as how to make bombs and footage of sniper attacks.”
“It’s good news if there are less of these on the Web,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said, speaking about terrorism training videos. “But many of these jihadist videos appear on different Web sites around the world, and any time there is investigative or intelligence value we actively pursue it.”
Result for: how to
Over the last year the consortium P2P Next has set out to develop a new bandwidth efficient video streaming BitTorrent client, mainly by utilizing the Tribler file-sharing technology.
P2P Next consists of 21 broadcasting, technology, and academic partners, and was even given a $21 million grant from the EU earlier in the year. Last week, the public beta release of SwarmPlayer, “an open source, cross platform BitTorrent application adapted to the live streaming technology” showed the culmination of P2P Next’s work.
Pushing ahead with the technology is the TV show torrent indexer EZTV which has announced it has incorporated the technology into their indexer.
“EZTV has introduced BitTorrent Video Streaming!,” a news statement reads. “Instead of having to wait for an entire TV Show to download fully before you can watch it, it is now possible to use BitTorrent to watch a TV Show as it downloads!”
“This has been made possible with the use of new breakthrough technology in the form of a modification to the client-side BitTorrent protocol. This protocol modification has been implemented in a new program called SwarmPlayer in conjunction with a new .tstream format.”
Looks good.
