Ministry of Sound pulls out of BT P2P info test case

The Ministry of Sound has withdrawn a legal bid to force BT to hand over the details of customers suspected of unlawfully file-sharing copyrighted material.

The application was withdrawn on Wednesday. A month ago, BT said it would turn the record label's application into a test case, to see whether ISPs really had to turn such information over to rights holders, and stopped supplying the information to Ministry of Sound.

"It's a shame... that, in this instance, our concerns over the current process will not be examined by the Court," a BT spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday. "However, it remains our intention to ensure our broadband customers are adequately protected so that rights holders can pursue their claims for copyright infringement without causing unnecessary worry to innocent people."

The record label withdrew its application, it said, because of the heavy cost of providing "additional information to ensure that the privacy of BT customers would not be breached", and because BT had deleted 80 percent of the details it was after. "Whilst Ministry of Sound were happy to incur substantial legal costs to access 25,000 names it is simply not economic to pursue the 5,000 remaining illegal uploaders," the company said.

BT's spokesperson said Ministry of Sound was "well aware" that "all such information is automatically deleted from our systems after 90 days in accordance with our data retention policy".

"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," the spokesperson said. "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."