said by Linked Vispa Support Site:

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Copied from another location that I posted to this morning (75% of it will related, ignore the bits which are not) :

I can confirm that at present Vispa is conducting a semi (note: not everything) block on some P2P networks while we conduct some research (which has provided quite disturbing at present). It's not planned to remain in place, but continue reading and I think you will understand why we have had to do this.

This measure has come about due to possible heavy legal action against Vispa for allowing downloading to continue. This started from dozens of reports every single day, which grew to over a hundred or so a week or reports of Copyright Infringement.

At first we warned users by giving them a call, gave them a slap wrist, and asked them to remove software which had basically got them in trouble. However the situation has got to a point that we can't maintain this level of personal treatment, especially due to increased warnings.

Therefore to give Vispa breathing space from the legal letters that have hit our desks, we are looking at a possible reverse solution to this problem. Blocking by default, and then if a user wishes to use P2P, then have to request access. This will, via some sort of legal agreement that takes to legal stance off Vispa and places any wrong-doings directly on the End User. Of course we will explain all the risks etc at this point. We believe this is the safe solution for all parties.

Don't get us wrong, we like everyone know the benefits of P2P, it's approach to push small music artists, upstart software companies etc, but the true fact is that 90% of material belongs to someone else. Smaller ISPs are a perfect test legal case, we don't have the in-house legal teams or the experience/resources to put up a fair fight, and it's for this reason why the likes of Vispa are getting targetted, the big boys have done the research.

Bandwidth does not come into play at all, we have plenty of spare capacity across our centrals as well as core transit. Though I would like to point out that no where do we state we are an unlimited service. Every Broadband user needs to remember, regardless of ISP that services are contended between 50:1 or 20:1 users, sitting on high resources service 24/7 is totally unfair on others. I could put it as a little rude to have this type of mindset.

Also at no point have we changed our terms and conditions, the last update to these was 14/02/2004 which covers all points addressed above. They quite clearly do state that we can make measures to protect ourselves and the customers.
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Martin Pitt
Vispa Support Staff

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