TalkTalk talks about the Memorandum of Understanding
Thursday 24 July 2008 12:00:24 by Andrew Ferguson
Carphone Warehouse has signed the recently announced Memorandum of Understanding with the The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. Interestingly though TalkTalk has issued a press statement that it will strive to protect customers' rights to freedom of use of the Internet.
"It is not our job to tell customers what they should or shouldn’t be doing but we believe it is in their interests to warn them that they are being accused of wrongdoing. We will not divulge a customer’s details or disconnect them on the say so of the content industry, but we will work with rights holders to develop a sensible and legal approach founded on protecting consumer rights and privacy."
Charles Dunstone, CEO, The Carphone Warehouse Group
Protecting the rights of customers is important, but if it can be proven that a customer is carrying out illegal activity using a broadband connection any provider that defends a customer in that situation would probably find themselves in court too. Talk Talk seems to be asserting simply that it will respect customers privacy and not reveal identities to external parties without the normal legal processes. The new memorandum with the BPI means that the BPI does not find out exactly who has received the warning letter, as the ISP does not pass on any details, but simply cross references the data supplied against its own customer database.
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What the UK industry needs to do id to lay the law down on what is and is not allowed.
For example I want to know at what point do you have a copy of a song for example when using BitTorrent 100% or 1% of the file
Just becuase you are in a swarm does this mean you are guilty, because until you have it 100% downloaded you don't actually have a copy, you only have 1's and 0's
quote"Is this not a complete U-Turn on what he said previously?"
They aint called Talk Talk for nothing ;)
I agree that Charles Dunstone is against any action, especially regarding customer relations and sorting Talk Talk mistakes.
I bought my grandson an MP3. We loaded a CD > PC > MP3. When he tried to play it said that he was not authorised to play the music on that device. Why not? He bought the CD, I bought the PC & MP3. This never happened with XP, but is a spy programme installed in Vista.
I plugged the player into my PC, and without consent it connected to the Internet, and I received the message that I had been licenced by Microsh*t to download legal music from the Internet on that PC only which I did not intend to do. At an average 70P a track downloading is not an option.
If you bought the MP3 in the internet (Itunes, etc) , it is locked with DRM, it can only play on the devices it is authorised for.(your PC & player connected to it)
CDs as well have some mechanism to 'detect' if it is on a PC, to try to stop copying.. rather stupidly, as many cheap car and portable HIFI players use 'PC-type' CD decks, causing more problems!
If you are using the Vista program to create the MP3 CD, that may be the problem..
A fiend of mine has had no problem with creating them using NERO on his Vista laptop..
If you want to stop spyware get 'adaware' at lavasoft.com!
CPW have signed a "memorandum of Understanding"; don't make me laugh; the day they understand anything at their customer services "support" centre will be the day i go back to them for a mobile!
It looks like you have not read the article!!!
- It is not customer services that have signed it!!!
It is the Management that have basically signed an agreement to protect the rights of customers to not be 'accused without their knowledge' and given a fair trial.
there is something similar to protect people from being arrested, 'just because someone said they did illegal things' ...
Is this not a complete U-Turn on what he said previously? I thought Charles Dunstone was against any action whatsoever.