Do not be surprised to receive an email from your ISP, especially if you have been pirating copyrighted content. The four biggest ISPs in the UK which include BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky are all up for it. The letters will be sent starting January 17.
The tone of the letters is not what you will expect though. Instead of court summons or a disconnection threat, you will get a friendly reminder to get your pirated content from a legitimate source. This is all thanks to Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme will be arriving later this month.
According to a Virgin Media spokesperson, the right holders will flag to ISPs individual IP addresses in what is called Copyright Infringement Reports (CIRs) that have identified to have shared pirated content using the ISPs' networks.
The CIR will only be sent to an ISP when it is already confirmed by the right holders that copyright infringement has definitely occurred. The email will also only be sent to a subscriber once the IP address in the applicable CIR can correctly matches to the active subscriber account.
You will most likely get an email promoting the government-backed campaign called Get it Right From a Genuine Site which aims to fight for copyright owners in their place. The letter then follows this up with: "It looks like someone has been using your broadband to share copyrighted material..." Afterward, the email will list the copyrighted content then will provide a link to a website containing tips and advice to help the user stop it from happening again.
"The educational campaign has now been running successfully for over a year with the educational email element beginning during the early part of 2017," Get it Right representative said.
Get it Right screens peer to peer networks for any pirated downloads, however streaming and cyber-lockers are not included.
