UK: Virgin (?) to pay labels for 'illegal' downloads

[arkitect]

How ever will this be made to work?
Sounds like a nightmare to me…

Guardian Link…

One of the UK's top ISPs is preparing to launch an unlimited music service that would see it pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customers, paidContent:UK can reveal.

Playlouder MSP (music service provider), which first tried the model for itself back in 2003, said it will facilitate the service for the broadband operator, starting early next year. Co-founder Paul Sanders would not name the ISP, but a source last month told paidContent:UK Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) was holding some kind of talks with the vendor…

Playlouder's service lets users legitimately download from channels like Gnutella, BitTorrent and more - the list goes on - because the "deep packet inspection" technology, installed on the broadband infrastructure, recognises every song downloaded over the ISP network, no matter which protocol, and reimburses rightsholders accordingly. Subscribers to the music package will even be allowed to share tunes amongst themselves because every transfer is anonymously tracked using Audible Magic, but proliferation to non-subscribers will be blocked.

 

[Macjames]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A347 Safari/525.20)

It's an interesting idea I'll admit but I can't really see it taking off as I would never pay for the poor quality of bit torrent tracks. Windows users better make sure that their anti virus is up to date!

Now that I think about it, this must be one of the best steps against piracy that has ever happened, rather than taking on a David and Goliath battle of shutting these sites down, working with them seems a much better idea.