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Given our record on this sort of thing, the ISPs here will cheerfully comply.

They already have. At least some - Three Ireland, on their mobile broadband, seem to be blocking all requests containing "torrent" in the URL.

Given our record on this sort of thing, the ISPs here will cheerfully comply.

How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.

I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.

"You might have noticed that the big music firms are suing Eircom, demanding that it put in place a system for monitoring peer to peer filesharing and blocking transfers of their music. We think that this is a bad idea. Here's why.

Intermediaries, not police

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are intermediaries. They are not, in law, responsible for what internet users do, any more than An Post is responsible for what individuals send in the mail. In fact, European law specifically states that they may not be put under a general obligation to monitor the information they transmit. This action undermines this principle and threatens the privacy of internet users - in much the same way as if An Post had to open and examine the contents of every letter they carry. Here's what the ISPAI had to say about this:

The Association is totally opposed to any obligation (such as that apparently in this Belgian court decision) that ISPs should monitor all of their customers' Internet communications on the off-chance that someone may be distributing copyrighted work which they do not have permission to use. (How is an ISP, or any other third party, to know whether a communication is copyrighted, who owns the copyright or whether permission has or has not been granted?)

The privacy of all personal and business communications is at stake here. This is the electronic equivalent of the post-office steaming open every letter in the sorting office, checking the contents and never delivering the bits some unknown worker believes should be censored. If legislation forced ISPs to monitor, never mind the democratic or moral issues, in practice everyone would immediatly switch to encryption rendering any such monitoring useless, the monitoring process itself would slow the Internet to an unusable snail's pace.

Privacy

This technology will result in ISPs being obliged to monitor everything internet users do - in effect, acting as private censors for all users without any warrant or even mere suspicion that a particular user is doing something wrong. If the music industry has evidence that a particular person is sharing copyrighted files then they can and already do take action against that person. If they do not have that evidence then they should not be demanding that ISPs monitor innocent users."

I suppose you wanted to say: "nobody is allowed to store your personal data without warning you and giving methods to correct and erase your data."
This is a principle of German "Recht auf Informationelle Selbstbestimmung".

Anyway, I agree with Germany's 'commissioner for data protection and freedom of information' Peter Schaar (wrong name in TFA) that an IP is public, but nevertheless personal data (better term in German: "personenbezogene Daten") because as the 'Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data' (see Directive 95/46/EC) states:

Article 2
Definitions

For the purposes of this Directive:
(a) 'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

Some prior commentators already agreed that a telephone number is personal data (though many don't seem to know the difference between private and personal data). Why not treat IPs the same way?

Please note that not all is well in Europe since telephone numbers (already regarded as personal data) and IPs have to be stored by the associated carriers (ISPs for example) for later processing by law enforcement agencies (allegedly solely) in the course of investigating terroristic activities and other crimes (see 'Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks').
This is heavily disputed (see e.g. http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/ and Digital Rights Ireland challenge to Data Retention).
By the way, there are some proposed methods to disable logging of IPs regarding Apache webserver - et al..

For more information about 'EU Data Retention' see EU Data Retention - doqumentation and Electronic Privacy Information Center.

A legal challenge has been started by Digital Rights Ireland before the Irish courts. If successful it should have the knock on effect of invalidating laws such as the German one. Full details here:

http://www.digitalrights.ie/2006/09/14/dri-brings-legal-action-over-mass-surveillance/

it makes me glad to live in Ireland

You need to read this. Right now. And this. It's not good when you are critizing other countries for doing things your country has already done...

The United Kingdom, France, Ireland and Sweden are attempting to persuade the European Union to introduce a directive which would make data retention mandatory throughout the EU....

It passed.