Ministry Of Sound’s Legal Actions Grind To A Hold

Written by the B&B Crew Friday, 05 November 2010 13:00

News -

Ministry of Sound is suspending their legal action against alleged illegal uploaders. The suspending is caused by the provider “failing to preserve” essential information of more than 20.000 alleged uploaders, according to a MoS statement.

A few months ago we reported to you about the legal actions Ministry of Sound was taking against alleged illegal filesharers. Ministry of Sound’s lawyers had come to an agreement with BT Total Broadband to get personal information of 25.000 customers, but according to MoS statement the broadband provider failed to preserve information of 20.000 of those people.

Minstistry of Sound’s CEO Lohan Presencer says It is very disappointing that BT decided not to preserve the identities of the illegal uploaders. Given that less than 20% of the names remain and BT costs have soared from a few thousand pounds to several hundred thousand pounds, it makes no economic sense to continue with this application."

BT on their turn responded surprised to the incident stating “All such information is automatically deleted from our systems after 90 days in accordance with our data retention policy; the Ministry of Sound and it solicitors are well aware of this. Upon request from Ministry of Sound we saved as much of the specific data sought as we reasonably could and any not preserved must have been too old. Our door remains open to Ministry of Sound and any other rights holder who wants to enforce their rights in a fair way through an established legal process."

Ministry of Sound was planning to take legal actions against 150.000 suspected file sharers and over 5000 warning and settlement letters were already send out. This “indicident” is a bit of a setback but MoS says they are more determined then ever to pursue those illegally uploading music and depriving artists of royalties and “reducing the money which we can invest in new British talent."