BT: Antipiracy efforts will cost £1m per day

Considerably more than losses sustained by the industry

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23 September 2009 9:47 GMT / By Duncan Geere

BT has warned that the file sharing efforts proposed by the government and Peter Mandelson could cost the industry £1m every day. That would increase each customer's bill by £24 per year, said John Petter, the head of the company's consumer division.

The music industry claims that file sharing costs them £200m each year, though many analysts have poured scorn on those figures, saying that that statistic is based on flawed methodology and inaccurate monitoring, as well as the assumption that one download is equivalent to one lost sale.

"[The music industry's] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense", said Petter. "Laws already exist to enable music companies and other copyright holders to prosecute offenders but they don't want to take the hit to their public image".

He also points out that innocent parties - like the parents of kids who file share without their knowledge - risk getting cut off the Web under plans proposed by the government, and that every other method of detecting file sharing has failed as pirates go deeper and deeper underground, which brings John Gilmore's famous quote to mind: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

P2P news site TorrentFreak adds that it's possible to hide every single bit of traffic on your connection through a VPN service for just £3 per month - 10p a day. In that manner, no-one would be able to tell what you're doing on your connection. "That's around 10p per day to defeat a £1m a day system that isn't even in place yet. Something doesn't add up", says the site.