The British Phonographic Industry has today accused BT of aiding online music piracy by refusing to discuss the issue of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping:

"BT is the biggest service provider in terms of peer-to-peer traffic but getting them to discuss the issues is like pulling teeth," said Jollyon Benn of the BPI's anti-piracy unit. "It will be a red letter day when they talk to us," he added.

"BT is trying to create business links with the music industry at the same time as being completely intransigent to the issues of piracy," he said. BT has recently launched Dotmusic, an online service offering users unlimited downloads from a catalogue of 150,000 music tracks for a monthly fee of £9.99.

BT is also the largest user of peer-to-peer bandwidth, although all other ISPs also allow users access to such services.

BTs defence is that the act of peer-to-peer file-sharing isn't inherently illegal, which is fair. Just where do you draw the line? It's not as if ISPs can monitor everything their customers do online.

Tiscali was also unfairly accused of the same thing when they launched a similar service. Ultimately both systems are commercial and cover legal music file downloads.

More to the point, BTOpenworld once again reiterated that it had no current plans for placing a download cap on its broadband services. More @ BBC News Online.