EU has doubts as ISP rolls out DPI for copyright enforcement

Nate Anderson
ars technica
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Back in November, UK ISP Virgin Media announced that it would start using deep packet inspection gear to start riffling through user traffic. The goal was to search some of the leading P2P networks in order to measure copyrighted material passing through them. Today, the European Commission indicated that the plan is problematic, and it will keep a close eye on the trial.

In the middle of last year, Virgin announced a stunning music plan: unlimited streaming and downloads of non-DRMed music files from Universal (with deals hopefully to come from other labels). The music would be part of your ISP subscription fee, and downloads would be yours to keep forever.

After giving Virgin permission to use the "carrot," though, labels wanted a bit more "stick" applied to users who continued to infringe copyright. Virgin had no real way to measure the effective rate of copyright infringement by its users, so in November 2009 it turned to Detica, a unit of European arms contractor BAE systems.

Detica developed a product named CView that, in the words of the company, "applies high volume, advanced analytics to anonymous ISP traffic data, and aggregates this information into a measure of the total volume of unauthorised file sharing."

Full article here

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