Get it Right – Copyright Holders Scrap UK ISP Piracy Letters Scheme

The Voluntary Copyright Alert Program (VCAP), which has so far seen broadband ISPs in the UK send around 1 million “educational” internet piracy warning emails (“subscriber alerts“) to consumers they suspect of taking part in copyright infringement, has been ceased because it “served [its] purpose.”

The alerts system involved all of the biggest ISPs (BT, TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and Virgin Media etc.) and formed part of the government fostered Creative Content UK initiative (Get It Right from a Genuine Site), which among other things expected to “send millions of educational notices” to those detected by copyright owners as infringing their content via Peer-to-Peer (P2P) File-Sharing (e.g. BitTorrent) networks.

However, unlike the bullying letters sent by dubious copyright protection firms in prior years (“speculative invoicing“), the new alerts were designed to be more educational (i.e. pointing end-users to legal alternatives) and didn’t contain any threats of punishment or demands for money.

Earlier this year the UK music industry – via the BPI – broke with years of silence on the subject by revealing to a conference in France that it had so far sent around 1 million piracy alerts (roughly 500,000 per year) and less than 1% of the recipients had called for further information (here). Overall the campaign (covers more than just alerts) was said to have led to a 26% reduction in piracy.

We had been expecting this to continue after the Government committed an additional £2m of public money to keep the “Get it Right” campaign going until 2021 (here) – on top of the £3.5m that it initially began with – but a report on TorrentFreak has confirmed that the warning notices will no longer form part of this.

A Spokesperson for CCUK said:

“Having encouraged increased awareness of the value of genuine content and of its many legally available sources, in turn resulting in reduced infringing behavior, the Get it Right campaign is now moving to its next phase.

The educational emails sent by ISPs upon detection of infringing file-sharing activity have served their purpose and are ceasing, with the focus instead increasing the broader engagement with fans based around their passion for music, TV, film and all other kinds of creative content.”

We can speculate that part of the reason for this may be the huge rise in legal alternatives (Netflix, Amazon Prime, NOW TV etc.), although equally consumers have become harder to track (greater use of VPN, Proxy Servers etc.) and court ordered website blocks by ISPs may have also had an impact. Going forward the UK Government has also hinted that it may make website blocking easier (i.e. turn it into more of an administrative than court managed process).

On top of that there are now other methods for accessing copyright content that pirates may be harnessing, although P2P file sharing services have not gone away and remain fairly popular. We await to see what the next phase of the “Get it Right” campaign will bring.