ISPs asked to cut off music pirates

The music industry is calling for ISPs to cut off serious copyright offenders as part of its offensive on digital music piracy.

The annual digital music report from music industry body IFPI said ISPs have been "very slow to help" the industry crack down on internet file-sharers.

The report said ISPs have the power to limit access to copyright-infringing material and therefore "hold the key to substantially reducing online piracy".

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The IFPI is calling for ISPs to honour their own terms and conditions and disconnect users who infringe copyright laws.

The independent Gowers Intellectual Property Review, published in December 2006, recommended that ISPs and the music industry voluntarily agree on a procedure to remove users engaging in piracy by the end of this year, or face government intervention.

The music body has been in talks with ISPs for a couple of years but the "discussions have been proceeding quite slowly and are really going nowhere", according to an IFPI spokesman.

A spokesman for the Internet Service Provider's Association (Ispa) told silicon.com disconnecting users is "not as easy as the IFPI might think" and proper legal procedures need to be in place before action is taken to ensure other laws - such as the rights of internet users - are not broken.

ISPs are mere conduits of information and "cannot inspect every single packet of data passing across the network, just like the post office cannot open every envelope", said the Ispa spokesman.

Six months ago ISPs slammed calls for a tariff that would mean they have to pay music companies for money lost due to illegal downloads.