Carphone Warehouse threatens court action to stop file sharing disconnections

 

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Posted on 1 Oct 2009 at 09:35

Carphone Warehouse has threatened to take the Government to court if his company is forced to disconnect file-sharers.

Carphone Warehouse owns TalkTalk, the UK’s biggest broadband provider with 4.25 million customers, and chief executive Charles Dunstone said the company would “continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers”, without a court order.

“The approach proposed by Lord Mandelson is based on the principle of guilty until proven innocent and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court,” Dunstone said.

“In the event that we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will refuse to do so and challenge the instruction in the courts.”

Indeed, Dunstone claimed the Government’s proposal could escalate incidents of Wi-Fi hijacking.

“What is being proposed is wrong in principle and it won’t work in practice. The unintended consequence of Mandelson’s plan will be to encourage more Wi-Fi and PC hijacking and expose more innocent people to being penalised wrongfully.”

ISPs are becoming increasingly strident in their opposition to the Government’s proposals, which BT has said could add £2 to the cost of monthly broadband bills.

BT has also disputed music industry claims about the extent of file sharing activity.

“We definitely do not know the extent of illegal file sharing on our network,” a spokesman told PC Pro.

“Many peer to peer applications are perfectly legal, such as World of Warcraft, BBC iPlayer and Skype. To investigate the exact nature of each peer-to-peer packet would involve an intrusive level of inspection of people’s traffic and customers would rightly complain about BT infringing their privacy where we to do it.”

The BPI disagrees.

“It’s very safe to say the overwhelming majority of that traffic is illegal,” its spokesman said.

“The evidence we are providing includes IP addresses, time and date stamps, and details of the individual files [downloaded]. The evidence is entirely robust.”

[photo: Justice by MattLazycat; some rights reserved]

Author: Stuart Turton / Barry Collins / Simon Aughton