Virgin Media Forced to Give Up P2P Service

Virgin Media has abandoned its plans for a legal peer-2-peer (P2P) music file sharing service ('Virgin Music Unlimited') which would have meant the company offering record labels revenue for tracks downloaded by its customers, the ispreview.co.uk reports.

The decision seems to be linked with some major record labels, including Universal Music and Sony Music, putting pressure on the broadband service.

“The service would have been revolutionary, helping to monetise some of the 95% of music downloads the music business acknowledges are illegal. Virgin would have effectively allowed paying subscribers to continue transferring songs over P2P networks, and would have paid royalty collectors for the privilege,” says forbes.com which amplifies the importance of this failure.

The Register makes a good point saying: “Similarly, many parts of the music business now express the view that prosecuting users and attempting to halt behaviour fails to bring in any revenue. 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.”

Neither Virgin Media nor several record labels made comments on rumours but Virgin’s partner on the project, PlayLouder, said that the agreement dropped indeed.