British ISPs Will Give Pirates 20-Day Grace Period
British ISPs will soon start sending piracy notifications to their subscribers who were caught sharing copyright-infringing content. The anti-piracy campaign is named "Get It Right" and has already published a website with a FAQ detailing an agreement the copyright owners reached with major Internet service providers in their attempt to lower piracy rates in the country.
The operation could start any day, with the campaign’s official information portal going online. The ISPs are to send notification letters pointing copyright infringers to this portal to learn answers to the most popular questions about the campaign. So, what is new about the procedure? For example, file-sharers will be given a 20-day grace period after a warning email before they receive another one. This period is much longer than 7 days in the United States. Another benefit is that all data is removed from the database after 1 year if no further piracy incidents are recorded. On the other hand, it doesn’t actually matter how many emails Internet users receive, because the procedure involves no punishment.
It also became known that Sky-owned NOW TV and BT-owned PlusNet also entered the list of the ISPs who are required to send out warnings, along with the previously announced BT, Sky, Talk-Talk and Virgin Media. The new site answers the most frequently asked questions and contains a few educational videos (some of which are copied from the US Copyright Alert System) demonstrating how they work and how users can secure their wireless network.
The industry observers pointed out that no official appeal process was described in the procedure – it looks like there is no option to dispute an infringement claim. However, this shouldn’t cause any problems, because people aren’t directly at risk of being punished. The experts also noted that the portal uses some outdated terms that refer to long defunct P2P apps like LimeWire, although the new campaign generally focuses on torrent file-sharers. In fact, BT also made such a mistake in their advisory, but was quick to fix it.
Copyright holders and Internet service providers have agreed to cap the number of warnings at 2.5m per year. "Get It Right" campaign will stay active for at least 3 years.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.
