Ministry of Sound abandons net piracy case

The music giant Ministry of Sound has been forced to suspend its plans to pursue thousands of people who allegedly share music illegally online. Its solicitors had hoped to secure a court order to obtain the names and addresses of the connection owners claimed to have broken the law. The attempt by the solicitors to gather the information of illegal downloaders has been delayed due to worries of BT who are concerned about how their customers data would be used and stored. The case was abandoned after it emerged that BT had deleted 80% of the data. The ISP, one of three which were targets of Ministry of Sound solicitors stated 20,000 of the 25,000 requested details had been deleted to comply with data retention policies. BT stated that it held data for 90 days before deleting it. BT stated, 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 bee too old. Although Ministry of Sound are understood to be very disappointed that BT failed to preserve the identities of the alleged file sharers. The Ministry of Sound CEO Lohan Presencer stated, Given that less than 20% of the names remain and BT costs have soared from a few thousand to several hundred thousand pounds, it makes no economic sense to continue with this application.