The UK Government, the recording and film industry, and six of the UK's biggest ISPs are collaborating to fight illegal file sharing.

Under the arrangement, UK ISPs BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB have agreed to send 1,000 threatening letters a week to customers caught illegally trading copyrighted movies and songs.

It's proposed that repeat offenders will be punished with reduced broadband speeds.

The ISPs have been quick to point out that they will not be 'spying' on their customers by analysing their traffic data.

Instead the recording and film industries will be collecting file-trader's IPs using BitTorrent and P2P clients such as Limewire.