British Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has suspended its plan to provide people with music sharing service, according to a P2P website report.
The Register said the record producers put pressure to the ISP company, forcing the latter to pull out its plan of providing legal P2P service even before its launching few weeks from now.
If only the “Virgin Music Unlimited” plan has been executed, this would be a landmark event since it could be the first service to legalize the whole process of file-sharing. But since the record producers including Sony Music, BMI Music, and Universal Music stipulated to Virgin that file-sharers should not be able to upload and download contents, the latter abandon its plan as the demand of the music companies is not in line with the whole concept of file-sharing.
With the collapse of the partnership deal between the ISP and record labels, file-sharers are again in a dilemma as the proposed legal service has not been executed, forcing them to go to what experts called “pirates” in order to download music files.
Earlier reports said that the music industry is experiencing slumping sales. Meanwhile, companies blame bittrorrent sites and peer-to-peer services as the primary source of its declining sales. Whether this allegation has some basis, experts all agree that record labels should utilize the Internet to provide legal service for music sharing files as people will continue to patronize “pirates”.
Instead of charging file-sharers, record labels should resort to other constructive ways such as creating a legal service for distributing music. But in doing so, the industry should make sure to offer better service to lure people and convince them not to patronize “pirates”.