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Originally Posted by ian@huth
Recording of TV from the broadcast in the UK onto video for time switching purposes is legal.
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Indeed, and only for time shifting and has to be a temporary recording.
There's no fair use concept in UK copyright law unlike in the US which means you aren't really even allowed to keep a broadcast as an archive recording, and you definitely can't distribute and download them... without permission that is.
The BBC's forthcoming interactive media player uses a licenced system so that you can only keep recordings for a set period (much like Sky+ when recording premium material).
Going back to the subject of usage though. I run a fairly low bandwidth web server on my PlusNet connection and yet that will result in between 500mb and 1Gb a month alone if down and upstream traffic is considered. Add to that something like Fedora Core 4 which I downloaded this month which is another 2.5Gb, and a pile of other perfectly legit software downloads which probably add up to a few hundred Mb, the odd video (trailers, NASA & BBC feeds), and radio traffic (legit stuff), plus surfing media rich web sites and playing online games like Star Wars Galaxies, and I average around 5 or 6Gb a month.
Some months it's a lot more, but the highest I've ever done is 20Gb.
The UK average is actually around 6Gb a month.
75Gb is a lot. On the other hand with only 2Mbps connections, an extremely small percentage of PlusNet users were consuming up to 500Gb a month!!!, so 75Gb is by comparison very small especially for a 10Mbps connection.
The question is whether NTL's caps are counted on downstream only or on both up and down?