The free ride's over.
Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BT and Plusnet customers have been given 20 days to stop downloading content illegally.
The providers are supporting the government's Get It Right initiative, an effort to stop people pirating copyrighted material via torrent sites such as Pirate Bay.
While customers do not face the threat of disconnection if they continue breaking the law in this way, they will be contacted and asked to remove or disable any offending software.
Customers will also be encouraged to use legal alternatives such as Spotify, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix in order to access audio and video content.
Internet providers will not actively monitor people's online activity in order to find instances of illegal file sharing, nor will copyright holders.
Instead, copyright holders will track activity on peer-to-peer networks to identify instances where their content is being illegally uploaded and shared.
The Internet Protocol address will then be noted and their internet provider will be notified.
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