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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.
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.
All ISPs in the Irish Republic report reduced revenues and profits.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
Or, if they implement this how I think they will, a quick DNS server switch should do the trick.
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."
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.
...that will prove how incompetent and underhanded the music industry [is]
Incompetent? No. just that they see no need to actually verify that the content actually violates their copyrights. Besides, according to TFA, the agreement is that IRMA will supply lists of site they deem harmful to their business. Clearly, in their view, indy artists giving away music is harmful to the businesses of IRMA.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
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.
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
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."
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