Virgin Media To Install Anti Piracy Tool On Its Network

Virgin Media is geared up for trials of a new cutting edge illegal file sharing inspection technology that would help the network providers to gauge the extent up to which such an activity is prevalent on its networks.

The technology dubbed as “CView” has been developed by the technology consultancy company Detica and it is designed to help ISPs to monitor the level of illegal file sharing on their networks; however the technology does not help in tracking individual offenders.

Dan Klein, media accounts director at Detica, noted that CView employs ‘deep packet inspection’ technology, but evades any IP addresses in its outcomes, implying that it wouldn’t take out the data of individual offenders. Quoting the same, he said, “It's a network device mirroring the traffic, so in that sense it's deep packet inspection, but that's where it stops”.

“We believe we've found something which is proportionate to the problem of copyright infringement. We don't believe that finding the individual [offender] is proportionate”, Klein added.

A spokesperson for Virgin Media told ZDNet UK that the company wouldn’t ask for the users’ consent to kick off the trial of the technology, and that the data of the users would be kept anonymised.