LONDON (ShareCast) - Britiain’s six biggest Internet service providers have caved in to government pressure and agreed to police illegal internet downloads.

Virgin Media, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali have agreed to participate in a three-month trial aimed at reducing the unlicensed sharing of copyright material via file sharing networks.

The Internet service providers (ISPs) have agreed to send letters to customers who habitually download large amounts of content via peer-to-peer computer networks, warning them their activities are being monitored.

Sanctions against users who refuse to heed the warnings will be thrashed out in talks between the ISPs and bodies representing the film and music industries.

Options discussed have included termination of Internet access, “throttling” of line-speeds to make downloading a long process, and content filtering.

In an echo of the concerns voiced at the time of the introduction of cassette tapes, the music industry claims to be losing a fortune as a result of Internet piracy. Industry figures suggest that if all the tracks currently downloaded illegally by UK internet users were paid for, it would boost industry revenues by £1bn a year.

Fergal Sharkey, erstwhile singer of The Undertones and now chief executive of musicians’ lobbying group British Music Rights, hailed the new initiative.

“This is something of a step into the unknown for the internet providers, music industries and ministers, but we can’t go on without it – no business can survive after losing as much revenue as the music industry has,” Sharkey said.

ISPs have previously argued that as mere carriers of Internet data they should not be held responsible for the content of the traffic they carry, in much the same way that couriers such as the Royal Mail are not obliged to verify that the contents of every package they deliver are legal.

The agreement of the big six ISPs represents a climb-down and could lead to habitual illegal file-downloaders defecting to smaller ISPs – a move which would probably be welcomed by the remaining customers of the big six ISPs, given that file sharers use up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, which slows down the service for other users.

• News Channel