Slashdot Mirror
IFPI Turning To Lawsuits
Sherman's doppleganger writes "The IFPI (the "European RIAA") has made a lot of noise about filtering this year, but it looks as though 2008 is instead becoming the year of the lawsuit. The IFPI has now sued an Irish ISP in an attempt to keep copyrighted content off of its network. 'The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted material to traverse its network unimpeded. The IFPI... wants the ISP to start filtering traffic to scrub all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material on its network.' The lawsuit comes less than a week after an Israeli court forced the nation's three biggest ISPs to block access to HttpShare.com."
does ireland have a legal concept similar to common carrier in the u.s.? i'm not a lawyer, much less an expert on the irish legal system, but it would seem to me that this case could only work in a country where common carrier laws are either non-existent or very weak. if ireland does have something like common carrier that would cover eircom then a win appears to essentially invalidate common carriers and make any isp that sends traffic through ireland potentially liable, even if both ends of the infringing connection are outside of irish jurisdiction.
But direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling musician if their music suddenly becomes a hit. To allow mass distribution at modest expense, I offer Bit Torrent downloads of my music.
I can't really see how an ISP could filter out copyright infringement without also filtering out files that are non-infringing.
Bit Torrent distribution is also crucial to Free and Open Source software projects, whose installers are sometimes hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.
And yes, I know I can host my work on free sites like MySpace, but then it would be MySpace's website and not my own that would benefit from links placed by fans. For business reasons, it's much better for a musician to have their own website if they possibly can.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I must admit that my Hebrew is not what it used to be ;), but it seems to be similar to rapidshare with the added benefit of searching the content.
Makes you wonder why rapidshare didn't implement this, oh wait - that would prove that most of the traffic is infringing copyright. Plus it would make it easier to sue those uploading. *AA must love httpshare.
On a more serious note I'm still surprised by the concept of keeping piracy down by going after those distributing it on the internet. Maybe that's the only way to go if you can't win in the long run. I'm still waiting for the hdd offering enough capacity to store all music ever produced. After that the one storing all movies is just a matter of time. Just calculate the current size of the ITMS and compare it to the growth rate of hard disks - makes it kinda silly to talk about this issue anymore...
I don't read replies by ACs.
...works fine from here. They're apparently thanking IFPI for the free advertising. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Read your own quote again. They said "all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material", not "all copyrighted material". That argument was a petty nitpick at terminology in the first place, but here, it's even more useless.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The Pirates didn't pass laws that robbed us of fair use. The Pirates didn't hide rootkits on CDs. The Pirates didn't create this massive DRM laden Windows Vista, Music Renting. The Pirates aren't the one putting bandwidth caps, retarding the Internet's progress and putting levies on blank media. There are a number of other things. But what the *AA and IFPI have done has been far worse than any Pirate.
Pirating isn't something I know a lot about. Do the pirates make money from what they do, or are they just distributing copyrighted material for free? And is the former considered morally (or legally) worse than the latter? I'm not writing to disagree with you, by the way - it's just that I'd like to understand the issue better before I make my mind up!
/. comment threads? If I'm going to piss people off, I'll just wait until I can ask someone I know instead!)
(Oh, and on a side note, is it okay to ask questions like this in
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
the answer is both.
some pirates download and burn movies, and sell them for $3 each on street corners (see Asia)
It is my opinion that selling somebody elses work without their permission is both legally and morally wrong.
but the **AA and lawmakers lump people who just share music with their friends in with these pirates.
I see nothing wrong with sharing.
It's what they told me to do back in kindergarden.
-I only code in BASIC.-
really, how much harm can they do to your computer by using your wifi?
Your argument reminds me of a 3com sales guy who told me encryption isn't important for home connections since no one wants to break into your computer anyways. The problem is that it's not your computer they want; it's your internet connection.
They could start spamming and get your account disabled. There was also the time I got called in to find out why the office internet was so slow only to discover that one of the neighbouring offices that shared our internet connection had an open wifi and someone was using it to launch a DoS attack.
Then theres the guy they caught driving the wrong way down a one way street with his pants down in Ontario Canada. Turns out he was using someone's wifi connection to browse child porn. Imagine having that traced to your ip. Given the current guilty until proven innocent attitude when it comes to crimes against children your likely to lose your house and job before they even bother (if they bother) to find out you were innocent in the first place.
You're right, their behaviour has been crappy. But I think that we tend to lose sight of the fact that what we're talking about is a totally non-essential product. They're not restricting our access to water, shelter, education... Music is amazing, but there's no reason why we should be entitled to more than we can afford to pay for. A person isn't having his human rights infringed because he can't afford more than a couple of CDs and no-one will give him the music he likes for free. I think it's absolutely right to protest against fair use restrictions and the retardation of the Internet, but we have to acknowledge that it is illegal to distribute copyright-infringing material, and there's no valid argument to say that that is a fair or moral thing to do.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.