Virgin Media has become the first ISP to officially announce testing of a ‘deep packet inspection’ technology that will measure the level of illegal file-sharing on its network.

The system, called CView, is provided by a company called Detica and can then look inside those packets and analyse what is licensed and unlicensed. Information on licensed content is to be provided by the record industry.

CView is the first commercially available solution to provide a metric highlighting the volume and nature of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing activity on an ISP network,” says its owner, Detica.

But it, “does not, and cannot, identify individual Internet users,” it states flatly, boasting it’s, “The only accurate way of providing a ‘digital piracy’ index to both ISPs and CPs is to measure the actual P2P activity taking place within an ISP network.”

A Virgin spokesman said none approximately 40% of Virgin Media’s network would be monitored but none would be informed as doing so would be “counter-productive, because it doesn’t affect customers directly.”

Virgin claims that it is merely interested in how much of the file-sharing traffic infringes on copyright, and will simply measure the overall level of illegal file-sharing activity, rather than act on it. The company is also keen to emphasise that it will not keep a record on individual customers.

To think I was just about to sign up with Virgin after announcing it would be bring Tivo to the UK.

via The Register