Japan News is reporting that four major ISPs in Japan are working together to stop pirating activity, especially the use of the “Winny” and similar programs that allow peer to peer file sharing.

According to the The Yomiuri Shimbun:

the measure would become the first countermeasure against Winny-using rights-violators used by the whole provider industry.

The number of users of file-sharing software such as Winny in the country is estimated to be about 1.75 million, with most of the files exchanged using the software believed to be illegal copies.

A brief six-hour survey by a copyright organization monitoring the Internet found about 3.55 million examples of illegally copied gaming software, worth about 9.5 billion yen at regular software prices, and 610,000 examples of illegally copied music files, worth 440 million yen…

Peer to Peer file sharing software is not exclusively used for piracy, but it makes it easy for one user to download and store files which are then picked up from that local machine by other users. Thus rather than having a single server hosting copyrighted information all the computers on the network have the potential to send and receive the files.

It will be interesting to see how the Japanese cooperative agreement affects USA ISPs which historically have been very resistant to most regulations and agreements that make the ISP the enforcer of copyright or other laws.