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Music-Swapping Sites To Be Blocked By Irish ISPs
An anonymous reader writes "Irish internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping websites, as internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry. Eircom, the country's biggest internet provider, is to start blocking its internet customers from accessing music swapping."
Totally useless and a mere inconvenience for the die-hard file swappers. New sharing sites will pop up faster than I can say "First Post!" and new protocols to circumvent those blocks will have arrived by the time the mods have moderated "First Post" down to -1.
I guess it's back to the more private networks. How's that wireless mesh coming along to help get around these people?
What?
Yeah, it's the virtual equivalent of paying thugs to block access to a store.
Call the lawyers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The fucking article mentions Pirate Bay as one of these "music swapping" sites. So basically, they're after torrent trackers.
I won't go into explaining the difference between a hypothetical "music swapping" site and a tracker. Insert here gun, car and other analogies.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Yep. This is only going to stimulate: - a rapid development of secure p2p protocols. - a rapid adoption of encryption. - a lot of annoyance and public backlash. On the side, Ireland has one of the highest budget deficits in the EU. That means they're in a lot of financial trouble already, and lots of people are going to be out of jobs. But they aren't going to let "them" deny them access to their movies, songs and audiobooks; moreover, things like The Teaching Company (TTC) and BBC documentaries provide an extremely rich source of self-enrichment. People are going to be teaching themselves all matter of upgrades in their newfound free time. Anyway, all you Irish people can do now is roll out the Guiness and write your local political factions that this just isn't a good idea.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
So Rapidshare is blocked, then? And Megaupload? And Mediafire, Sendspace and Badongo? And the hundreds of other free filesharing services that seem to pop up everywhere?
This is completely futile.
Are they going to block all IRC access as well? There are lots of files being shared via DCC send commands. I suppose some IRC servers might expect an increase in user numbers in the near future...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
All ISPs in the Irish Republic report reduced revenues and profits.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Next up, socially and politically insensitive speech, porn, nude/violent/graphic images, low price merchants, and communication with unenlightened societies.
So many to choose from, it makes me dizzy just from thinking... oh, thinking!
For a related discussion on free (and non-RIAA) music, see:
I've just downloaded one artist's Creative Commons songs, and it's not half bad. I'd imagine he might earn cash on freelance composition.
Call the lawyer.
There, corrected it for ya.
Clearly, now the ISPs are responsible for any music-swapping that occurs since they've taken it upon themselves to determine what is or isn't legal.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Proxy. Nuff said.
Good, I think we need to block internet access to all of Ireland then ;). The internet is meant to be uncensored. If you can not understand that then you don't need access. The people that want to do it will just use other ways like IP tunneling.
You stupido lady
How many ISPs ?
How many stupidos ?
Between political correctness on the left, intolerance on the right, and pressure from crony capitalists to wall off their monopoly profits, pretty soon the only thing you'll be able to post on the internet will be cat pictures. :(
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
If they "accidentally" block Podsafe Audio http://podsafeaudio.com/ (All Creative Commons licensed content) that will prove how incompetent and underhanded the music industry and the ISPs are. I will be waiting for this to throw back into their faces.
Then anything that causes increased level of brain activity.
The first thing any good dictator needs to prevent is critical thinking.
Just so you know, I am pretty sure no one listens to April Wine anymore. Although, if you post that, 'Harder' and 'Faster' maybe some will listen.
Look, I Like to Rock and I will Say Hello Tonite because I am a Ladies Man. Before The Dawn we'll have Babes In Arms so you Better Do It Well so you don't become a 21st Century Schizoid Man.
All points of time and space are connected.
Not always.
They have legal uses.
Like <insert car/gun/ect analogy>.
Take for an example, the The Pirate Bay, they have otherwise censored documents about Scientology.
Other positive uses include:
Sampling
Content that the makers no longer profit from
Spreading legal material
Getting around technical DRM issues(ahem Spore)
what's the point? there are virtually thousands of anonymizing, privacy and proxies, trying to "block a site" is useless.
To me it sound more like the ISPs are telling the music industry "shut the fuck up".
Simply in terms of gross earnings, the music companies make peanuts compared to some other very big industries being negatively impacted by all this anti-piracy hullabaloo (sure, corporations probably don't pirate music, but this DRM and filtering and other BS all carry a cost for anyone working online). Are they just that much better at lobbying? Have they somehow nobbled all the right people? What gives?
Confused,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That's it, really. How sad.
expandfairuse.org
Here in NZ we have been about to suffer one of the most draconian media industry walkovers that made the DMCA look like a wet bus ticket ...
But then something entirely unexpected happened - the government actually after some shiny grassroot protests like the blackout thing that shut down many public sites here in NZ for the day.
I might actually have some hope for democracy after all.
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/
come to the dark side, we have penguins.
Do these conspiracy theories ever come true? They sure do rack up the karma...
How will I get all those denim-clad, teen-spirited, Bewitched classics now?
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
If they do that, people will simply start forums where people can swap their collections by sending their 32 and + GB usb flash drives through the mail. I bet it would save them money doing that too since the Internet costs so much...
President Madagascar!
They are gonna have one headache keeping track of all the different torrent hosting sites o.0
I live here. They're my ISP, for about another ten minutes.
Ireland is notoriously corrupt. Eircom didn't even fight the court case. I smell brown envelopes.
Personally I'm disappointed that my telecommunications provider does not block access to the landlines of brothels, drug dealers and anyone with an ongoing legal claim against them.
Irma, which represents major music groups EMI, Sony-BMG, Warner and Universal, is to begin compiling lists of websites that it claims are damaging its business.
Reminds me of the Red-scare issue when activist groups were creating lists.
So Irish governments have had the idea of making Ireland a tax haven for "creatives" - writers, musicians and artists. Given the current financial doo-doos, caused in part by the diversion of so much of the EU infrastructure budget to other purposes, they will naturally turn to trying to keep the recording industry onside. And with Dell going, and Apple deeper in bed with the recording industry, they have no incentive to support anybody else's business model.
Still, I expect the Irish communities around the world, full of people with enough go in them to want to escape, will welcome the influx of young well-educated people.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Nice attempt at spin, but when you copy music from someone else that isn't swapping, unless you automatically delete your copy.
Its copying, and with copyrighted music, its copyright infringement. Renaming it 'swapping' is just a silly piece of spin that holds no water with the law, nor should it.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Do these conspiracy theories ever come true?
Where have you been for the past 10 years? Haven't you ever heard of the banking industry?
It goes something like this:
Music industry lobby
Lobbyist: Hi Mr MP, how would you like to meet Bono?
MP: OMG HE WAS MY IDOL AS A CHILD I'D LOVE TO
Lobbyist: Okay, just implement these laws otherwise Bono will be a very very sad person and might not want to come out and see you
MP: Sure!
IT industry lobby
Lobbyist: Hi Mr MP, how would you like to meet Richard Stallman?
MP: Who?
More seriously though, I think the issue does seem to be at least from my experience of reading into comments from various British MPs that the music industry is much better connected and MPs are much more likely to bow down at their feet simply because although some people of their generation are the founding fathers of IT as we know it, many more simply missed the boat with the IT thing and MPs nearly always fall into the latter- they just don't get IT, but they ALL know who Bono and so on is and they all worship these types of people. We don't have any IT literate MPs here and I'm not sure it's much different abroad, Obama is one of the first politicians I've seen that actually seems to have a decent grasp of technology.
I think the crux of it is that people in the music industry and politicians seem to get on well, they just seem to have the same mindset whilst IT and Science simply don't seem to get on with politicians as well. In that scenario it doesn't really matter what an industry is worth, most politicians don't seem to take a logical approach to decision making like that. They're more fallable to arguments such as "Piracy is wrong, it's illegal, it always has been, it must be stopped" than they were to reasoned arguments producing statistics showing piracy is only bad for the major labels but probably good overall for the population as a whole. If politicians did follow a logical, reasoned way of thinking then in the UK at least we wouldn't be seeing this consistent push for ID cards despite the population, the opposition parties, ex-security service leaders, employers/businesses being against it and costs for the scheme ballooning into many many billions of pounds- no logical or reasoned thought would lead to the conclusion that continuing such a scheme is a good idea.
One final note is that a few weeks back David Cameron mentioned that if the Conservative party made it into power next that he would appoint someone from the creative industry to be in charge of deciding the UK's broadband future. One has to wonder what on earth the logic behind that is when he could choose someone from the technology industry. That coupled with his speech to the BPI a couple of years ago that was full of ignorance and many other comments and events through the past few years along similar lines are a pretty good demonstration that David Cameron and the Conservatives are strongly tied to big media. I do not think Labour is any different judging by their actions. So one thing is for sure, their actions and comments in favour of big media over technology certainly add weight to the idea that yes, they have a much stronger lobby at very least or simply offer more "incentives" to MPs than technology does.
With the notable exception of Bill Gates (because he's filthy rich and does good charity work) and Steve Jobs (because Apple is as much a fashion company as a technology one) there is nobody in the technology sphere that has anywhere the celebrity power of most media stars.
I think you forgot Russia. I expect they'll have to cut off .ru and .cz, just to be thorough.
Quack, quack.
Someone's finally just thinking of the children. Too bad that seems to include all of Ireland, but that's a small price to pay for safety!
Quack, quack.
I think Europe tends to follow the United States in terms of policies. I would imagine it's because the trading with the US is so important, they want to stay on the good side of the US. Also, there's probably a strong lobby in Europe as well.
The music industry's war against its consumers is a guaranteed losing battle. We have already decided that music costs too much and we are refusing to pay their artificially high prices. They can either change or die. They chose to die. So this is just their attempt to survive.
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout-homepage.html Check that page out, follow the links. Maybe Ireland can start a similar movement.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You must be to describe IRMA so prefectly.
It must be noted, however, that IRMA is fighting to protect the meagre incomes of people like U2 and Enya - who are all just managing to survive with one castle each.
Sarcasm aside, due to the fact that musicians have a tax exemption (cos lord knows U2 need it) - there are unfortunately a lot of them here, and they also have great wadges of cash. This in turn makes IRMA far more powerful than it should be.
I still don't think the other ISPs are just going to rollover - Eircom is a joke. They are largest because they were originally a monopoly - and there is a large number of users that are slow to change.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
but there will always be the sneakernet.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in .com.fr,
we shall fight on the web and on usenet,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internet, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the servers,
we shall fight on port 443,
we shall fight in the VPNs and on P2P,
we shall fight in the darknets;
we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Internet or a large part of it were subjugated and censored, then our digital Anarchy beyond the web, armed and guarded by thepiratebay fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the New Internet, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
I hope that the block includes legitimate sources of music as well. After all, it wouldn't be fair just to block p2p to competitors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H err, "illegal" file sharing sites would it? Oh, what was that.. this isn't about justice..
Eircom was privatised years ago, its the biggest ISP in ireland. no wonder it "caved" into legal threats, have you ever heard of Cartel monopolies?
what eircom is doing is quite smart, their banning All (that they can find) file sharing sites and programs, and if you are caught 3 times downloading "illeagle music" they stop feeding you your connection,but still charge the contract.
Basically to sum it up - their going to make alligations over their extreme high bandwith users,and since you cant appeal these alligations, they could cancel your service, and viola less server usage.
I'll see you in court bitches.
As a consequence Irish People will be the first to develope good skills in circumventing internet blocking. Easy to use software to get around those things will be developed there for the use of us all if ISP's around the world get into the habit to try the same nonsense. Hey! I love darwinism! :-)
1. Find some reasonably popular band who is sharing, or is willing to promote their music on torrent sites.
2. Throw out a little press, get a reasonably large number of people outside Ireland to download/seed.
3. Sue the IRMA for tortious interference with contract, anti-trust, whatever shit you can make stick.
4. Profit?
Since it's not the government you can't really demand your rights from a private ISP but it seems to me that they're then also opening themselves up for lawsuits based on interference with business, something you couldn't do against a law.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Once they go down the road of blocking sites they can no longer make the perfectly reasonable defence that they're a service provider, not a censor. It *is* a slippery slope and only harm will come from it. If all ISPs give in, then the next thing will happen is the government will "helpfully" step in with a national firewall and force all providers to go through it. Internet access will become as repressive as it is in Australia or other countries that think they can control people by restricting what they can see.
I'd add that sites like the pirate bay are service providers too. It may well be that most of their content is copyright infringing, but not all of it. Furthermore, they just host tracker files so Eircom isn't even preventing piracy by shutting off that site. It wouldn't surprise me either if distributed search, trackers and crypto make it extremely difficult for Eircom to EVER shut off piracy or say with certainty who is downloading the latest Ubuntu and who is just downloading the latest copy of Windows.
By the way, does anyone know a decent and affordable VPN service in the US I can subscribe to?
You mean at least one website is still safe? So, the internet won't be entirely gone then?
Oh God !!! Why did you have dig him up ???
Never liked Churchill but why destroy such a great speech?
heres a decent quote that fits the situation
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." --Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
No matter what you search, the result is always the same
Just so you know, I am pretty sure no one listens to April Wine anymore.
I know you're being funny (?), but April Wine is on the active playlist of every "classic rock" radio station here in Canada. So basically... lots of people listen to April Wine and you're wrong.
...Ireland is one of the most conservative countries of western Europe. Remember that access to information about abortion thing? Apparently abortion isn't just still banned in Ireland, a situation which is by the way fairly representative of the general state of Irish law, but Ireland even tried (from 1983 to 1993) to ban access to information on abortion. Fortunately, it couldn't possibly work, not unless they would pull a China on us.
they should block google because that's how most people find music to swap.
Isn't Bono dead?
If the music business can sue ISPs for "damaging their business", the ISPs should counter sue because blocking filesharing is damaging their business (selling bandwidth)... Would be a fun trial...
The industry that prints CDs and DVDs is totally dependent on the monopoly given to them. Everyone suffering from this isn't so dependent. Therefore these monopolists will fight until their death, but people will not fight until their deaths about the right to use the last percentage of their own equipment.
But it's your own fault. You have bought CDs and DVDs! Every time you do, a bit on the Internet and your computer is stolen from you.
The end story is that we simply don't need CD and DVD-producers. The world would be far better off without them.
I am certain this will work!
They tour a lot too. I wish they would come to The Bay Area.
All points of time and space are connected.
Trading with the US isn't as important as you might think. For the vast majority of cases it's easier and cheaper to trade within Europe or the East. Europe looks as if it's following the US but I think it's more a case of the West in general moving in the same direction as all the politicians want the same sorts of things. You'll probably even find that the US is following as many European leads as Europe follows US leads.
yeah but good luck finding an MP (or TD as we call them here) young enough to have had bono as a childhood hero. Most of them still think in shillings.
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." --Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
1950 eh? So this was around the time that the entire country went bug-nuts over rounding up and silencing the dreaded communists?
I'm pretty much tech plebian who little of DNS switches and proxy ports. So how will I get around whatever screens the ISPs will inevitably put up? I'm with BT, who unlike Eircom haven't had a law suit brought against them and haven't had to filter anything yet - but the precedent Eircom have set kinda makes it an inevitability that they will. What tricks will I have to pull to still get to my darling torrents?
Eircom today suffered yet another outage, due to the increasing dissatisfaction of their customers. Many customers, fraught at losing their access to websites which Eircom classify as 'file sharing' have been donating cash, some of which from Social Benefit to fund DDoS attacks on key parts of the Eircom network.
When will the madness end?
But on the good side, it's the one story where it's appropriate to talk about Irish Evil ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." --Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
1950 eh? So this was around the time that the entire country went bug-nuts over rounding up and silencing the dreaded communists?
thinking about that not the best quote is it ?
new quote .......
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
John F. Kennedy
Hows that for a quote ?
Blocking music swapping sites is internet censorship and thats what really worries me here. I mean following the Ideas/polices of Capitalist-Communist [thats a weird combo] China ???
BTW, you should lighten up a little. Don't take my bad jokes about April Wine so personally. I wasn't aware people even remembered that band.
All points of time and space are connected.
If all the file sharing sites are blocked then whatever particular site a citizen is on could not be illegal. The illegal ones are blocked aren't they?
Either they filter or they don't, and if there is a filter then what gets needn't be looked at.
Btw, American posters, Ireland is a very different place in terms of how people see the law.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Oh Download boy, the pipes, the pipes are crawling
Eircom's gone and blocked the pirate sites
No mp3s, and torrents are appalling
'Tis all because of nutty IP rights.
But come ye back armed with your faithful proxy
Or simply find new URLs to parse.
'Tis not the science of the flying rocket
Oh Download boy, the law it is an arse.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
I'm glad someone is taking a step to stop piracy. People invest a lot of time and money on these things and I don't think its fair that their efforts go unawarded.
YAARRRR!!!!
Eircom.... they are the most technically inept company in ireland. The only problem is that any isp that supplies a DSL service does so at the sufferance of eircom. Eircom networks still own 90% of the phone cabling in ireland, magnet is slowly chewing away at that margin but every other ISP may find the pages getting blocked too.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.