Virgin Media Cancels ‘Virgin Music Unlimited’ P2P Service
The Register's Andrew Orlowski broke the news this week that Virgin Media had dropped its plans to offers a legal P2P file sharing service.
"The radical initiative, tentatively branded as Virgin Music Unlimited, represented a major investment for the ISP and would have been the first such attempt to monetise P2P file sharing in an ISP partnership in either Europe or the USA," Orlowski writes. "However, 11th hour 'anti-piracy' demands by major record labels including Universal Music and Sony Music meant Virgin could no longer launch the service as it had envisaged."
"Many parts of the music business now express the view that prosecuting users and attempting to halt behaviour fails to bring in any revenue," he adds. "Meanwhile, P2P remains a taboo: the one form of consumer behaviour that hasn't been given a legitimate revenue opportunity. Millions have been spent over the past ten years in prosecuting users, and rather less on building legitimate services that capture revenue voluntarily from this behaviour."
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