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."

Comments

"Turning" to Lawsuits? Come Now

[eldavojohn]

IFPI Turning To Lawsuits To say the IFPI is turning to lawsuits is like saying Bob Dylan is turning to drugs. It's an organization of lawyers! What else do they do?!

I recall them dishing out 2100 lawsuits at once in 2005 and 8000 lawsuits at once in 2006! And evidence that it's been going on since 2004.

You might be able to convince me that the IFPI is getting smarter (or stupider, depending on your views) at stopping file sharing by targeting ISPs with lawsuits but to say they're only now with litigating to stop these losses is ignorant.

httpshare.com?

[WK2]

I never heard of httpshare.com. After reading the summary, I went to the website, to see what it was. I still don't know what it is, because it is in Hebrew. However, in plain English, they mention that they upgraded their servers, and they thank IFPI for the free advertising.

common carrier?

[blackcoot]

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.

Re:common carrier?

[Atario]

It seems to me a basic concept of Western law. For example:

Should a toll road's owner be fined if someone transports illegal goods on it? Or required to search all cars that pass?

Should Disneyland be fined if someone manages to smuggle in 'shrooms and consume them waiting in line for Pirates Of The Carribean? Or conduct drug searches and tests on all patrons?

Should a taxi driver be fined if a passenger sneaks trash out the window? Or required to maintain all windows and doors to be sealed at all times?

Legal filesharing should be kept legal

[MichaelCrawford]

File sharing is crucial to the success of musicians such as myself who offer free downloads of their music. We do this to promote our work, and to gain fans.

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.

Re:Legal filesharing should be kept legal

[Beer_Smurf]

"File sharing is crucial to the success of musicians such as myself who offer free downloads of their music. We do this to promote our work, and to gain fans."
And that is one of the reasons it must be stopped.
You are the real enemy.

Re:Good

[Bryansix]

That's not what this is about. It's not about ISPs hosting copyrighted works that the person hosting doesn't own. It's about the ISP's customers downloading copyrighted works that they may or might not be authorized to.

These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere.

[Zombie Ryushu]

These people are ripping apart the infrastructure of one of Human kind's greatest achivements over their petty squabble. I'm really sick of it, and it would be easier if these people just got the hell off our planet. Fuck thesse people. Fuck the DMCA, Fuck the IFPI, fuck the EUCD, fuck it. I'm sick of these monsters that want to drag us down into the dark ages with their greed. Its just sick.

Re:These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere.

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Re:So all traffic should be banned

[LiquidCoooled]

Ok then clever clogs.
How do you know what is illicit and what is allowed?

Is the content of the website you are downloaded owned by (for instance) perfect 10?
Have I given permission to YOU to download a css stylesheet I designed for use on my website?

Is the Code in the software update you are getting copyrighted to the person you are getting it from?

Did the original rights owner give you permission to distribute that mp3 file to your IM friend?

the list is endless.
Without knowledge of what is illicit and what is allowed you might as well block the whole lot.

Re:So all traffic should be banned

[Kjella]

Unfortunately the distinction between permitted and not permitted is meaningless, as is the distinction between copyrighted and public domain. The ISPs see bits and bytes, but these are not properties of bits and bytes. The exact same transfer that's illegal today will be legal in life+70 (barring more Mickey Mouse acts), bit by bit. That means the only possible way for ISPs to tell an illegal download from a legal download is to keep a database over all possible illegal downloads, which works for a plain unencrypted transfer. However, as anyone that's worked with SSL knows it negotiates a random session key so there's an arbitrarily large number of streams of bits and bytes that transfer the same data. Once we arrive at this stage the ISP is basicly checkmated, there's nothing it can do.

What they are trying to do is to use the non-authenticated, plaintext nature of the negotiation phase as it is today to determine whether it's illegal or not. Creating an HTTPS version of torrents/trackers that doesn't leak anything to the ISP would be fairly trivial, so would adding authentication if the ISP tried its own SSL connection. At that point, the ISP is quite frankly guessing. They know you connected to TPB, but not what you searched for, what torrent you're getting and if it happens to be a legal download (many torrent aggregators just pick up everything) and you talk SSL to all your peers. There's no possible theoretical or practical way they can tell the difference between you downloading Ubuntu 7.10 (700MB) or a illegal DVD rip (700MB) over a torrent, the traffic patterns would be exactly the same.

To take a practical example where this is already all encrypted, I can connect via NNTPS to my news server. How the hell is my ISP supposed to know what I'm doing? They haven't got the faintest possibility to know anything at all. Of course in this case there's a server at the other end they could go after instead, but in a P2P network it's simply impossible. P.S. For anyone trying to make the lame pun about "The first rule about Usenet..." it's near 30 years old, and everyone that cares to know already knows about it. The only possible way an ISP could prevent copyrighted works from going over their networks is to turn off the lights.