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Irish ISP To Block Access To Pirate Bay
flynn writes "Ireland's oldest and largest ISP will be blocking access to The Pirate Bay from September 1st, while other ISPs have rejected the request to block TPB. From the Irish Times: 'Under an out-of-court agreement with EMI Records, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warners in January, Eircom agreed to cut off customers found to be repeatedly downloading music illegally. The deal also required Eircom to cut off access to Pirate Bay if requested. Yesterday, cable TV operator UPC, which has more than 120,000 broadband subscribers, announced it would not comply with a request to block access to Pirate Bay.'"
...it won't be money you're getting.
When can we cut access to EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Where I'm going to get my Linux distros now?
"repeatedly downloading music illegally"
I've downloaded music via TPB's index. Repeatedly. ALL of it was music put on bittorrent by the artist/copyright holder themselves for free download -- i.e. not "illegal" at all. How do they determine whether or not bittorrent downloads are "illegal"? Or do they just blindly assume "protocol == illegal"?
I guess Ireland's oldest and largest ISP won't be a full-service ISP anymore.
We're fucked now!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Just tell people "These guys want to restrict your internet to their approved list."
Oh, and don't buy from them:
http://www.riaaradar.com/
If anyone has a link to news about WHY the label sued the ISP, I'd like to read it; TFA was written as if it was common knowledge. The only snippet about the trial:
Doesn't Ireland have a "common carrier" status like the US? Here I thought the Europeans were more civilized than us, with their elected officials less beholden to monied interests. Does the oil company get blamed when the IRA throws molotav cocktails?
The poor ISP will start shedding customers right and left.
Free Martian Whores!
Does Eircom have competitors that subscribers can switch to, or is it like the "free market" United States, where many of us only have one choice for broadband access?
Once ISPs start regulating what they will and will not transport over their cables, they open themselves up to all kinds of lawsuits. You're willing to block piratebay.com but you didn't prevent that creep from downloading child porn? You didn't prevent that hacker from breaking into his school's records? You didn't block all kinds of other activities that are illegal?
I hate the concept of "slippery slope" but this really is exactly that. Either ISPs will start blocking anything and everything they are told is "wrong" and become de facto thought police or they'll become vulnerable to all kinds of lawsuits for failing to block "this" content given that they're willing to block "that" content.
The smart thing for them to do is just be dumb pipes. Provide access to the internet and let the people decide how to use it. If they use it illegally, let the police sort it out. Unfortunately, the various lobby groups (MIAA, RIAA, and their ilk) are probably offering up sweet deals that are financially appealing. Now. Over time, however, it will all come back to bite them in the ass. By then, however, the people who made these decisions will be rich and have moved on to other endeavours and won't care that they've ruined these companies and destroyed the integrity of the internet...
(Of course, the big joke of all this is that the internet was designed to route around problems such as this. The entire point of it was to provide a communication tool that could perform even when major disruptions occur. Not to mention, as is proven every single day, there are more people trying to break through the controls than there are trying to create them. More > fewer, always. These restrictions will only ever amount to temporary solutions, at best. It's a game of cat and mouse that they simply cannot win, ever, regardless of how hard they try.)
Hmm, I've had to speak to them as they bought indigo.ie. When I called them to inform them that their smtp server (actually an eircom server) was having load balancing issues they suggested that I try webmail instead.
Me: OK, I'll give the webmail a go for the moment, what's the address for it?
Them: Umm, I don't know, google indigo webmail
Me: OK
Them: I've just googled it for you, it's the 1st result: something something dot indigo dot ca
Me: That's a Canadian TLD, how's that going to help me?
Them: <Silence>
Good luck to them, you couldn't rely on them to arrange a piss up in St James's Gate.
So they are blocking the one torrent site that is pretty much self-destructing on it's own? I guess it could set a precedent for when the **AAs show up with entire domains and IP ranges they want blocked, but the sharing will just move to an anonomized format or into clustered cells of private peer groupings.
It has been my experience that the web does a very good job at routing around damage, and moves much more quickly that some trade association with an antiquated business model.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Eircom are not ireland's oldest ISP. They started operations as an ISP in 1996 (or in 1995 as Indigo, which they later bought out) and at the time, there were several other operators in the market: eunet ireland (the oldest commercial), ireland online, heanet (nren), connect ireland and internet eireann.
The EU is quite upset with Irish success actually, since it was achieved almost entirely by our low corporate tax rates, and the tax harmonisers dont like that one bit. Whatever aid was received was returned to the EU in spades via our fishing rights, and as for the Catholic state, that was largely the creation of the lunatic Spanish-American DeValera with his "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads" vision, a shambles we are still trying to unpick from our constitution. Remittances from the UK? Hardly. The US was the destination of choice for Irish emigrants, people who went to the UK rarely earned enough to send much home, since the local population viewed them as subhuman. Still, all this is besides the point, which is why you have turned a poor corporate decision by a group that isn't even Irish owned anymore into a spew of racist bile against the Irish people?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
It's Éire, not Eire.
What idiot keeps modding this racist trash up?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Who does he record for? Perhaps you could send us a playlist?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaahahhahahaha.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
They don't care. I think the logic is thus: "There is some of our IP on TPB that we didn't authorize. Therefore they are an infringing site and should be blocked." TPB pretty much tells the industry to go screw themselves every time they ask them to take something down so the industry has decided to have the ISPs take it down for them.
ok so 120,000 people use their ISP (maybe more in a household or small biz)... Thats small time considering the vast size of the internet user pool. Granted the implications kinda suck, but this will have the same effect as a small town just blinking out of existence on the web (even though we are talking about blocking just one site). Interesteing news, yes- impactful? Not really.
1. Create a free worldwide download service.
2. Reject all the legal threats
3. Get blocked by stupid ISPs
3. Sell the project
4. Legalize it.
5. Sue the stupid ISPs
6. Profit.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
1st of September? When the last "true" TPB user will stop caring about the project for good? Nice going. Good Luck with your useless block then.
Wouldn't most people accessing The Pirate Bay, especially for "illegal content" be using TOR or other web proxies anyway?
The best thing about blind censorship is that if they just equate one site with illegal downloads then it gets pretty easy for people to just keep changing sites, client software, protocols, etc. Laws that only deal with the surface symptoms of a problem never really solve anything and they actually just distract people, allowing pirates pretty much free roam.
Sounds like the ISP got their asses sued off and that their decision to block access to TPB wasn't necessarily completely willing.
I remember going to an Ireland Offline meeting where Eircom had a representative. During the Discussion it came out that Eircom were taking BT to court for not allowing LLU in London while BT was Taking Eircom to court for not unbundling in Dublin...typical
Global Gaming Factory (GGF) on 27th August 2009 will turn TPB into a legal p2p site, then they could have grounds to sue Eircom for blocking access to a legal download site. It could all happen and then duck when the fan gets switch on.
When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.
open up that host file and loopback the offending addresses.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You'll probably have to pay a special tax on your station wagon to compensate them for the potential piracy due to its non-underestimatable bandwidth
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
It was only saved by billions of EU money.
Billions of EU money never accounted for more than 5% of GDP. Quoth The Economist (from memory): "Nor is it the result of EU handouts. The Irish success is of Irish making, as successive governments have reduced taxation, improved education, and managed the public accounts in a sensibly austere manner."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.
Currently hooked on AMP
I've downloaded music via TPB's index. Repeatedly. ALL of it was music put on bittorrent by the someone pretending to be the artist/copyright holder themselves for free download -- i.e. not "legal" at all. How do they determine whether or not bittorrent downloads are "legal"? Or do they just blindly assume "protocol == legal"?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
TPB is about to be neutered.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh really? How so? They are a monopoly, and if they can keep the stranglehold on content and distribution ( and upcoming laws ) long enough to mould the next generation by 'reeducation', they have it licked.
As far as integrity of the internet, that was broken long ago. Pretty much day 2 after it was opened to commerce.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hate to say it, but this is not a troll, only an oblique literary reference.
It's a line from a poem by Michael Longely, a poet from Northern Ireland. The full quote goes
Here are two pictures from my father's head--
I have kept them like secrets until now:
First, the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with 'Fuck the Pope!'
'No Surrender!': a boy about to die,
Screaming 'Give 'em one for the Shankill!'
and can be found here.
It's a hard to work out precisely his point, but let's not be so quick to call troll next time eh?
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003849996876419856805:erhhdbygrma&ie=UTF-8&q=&sa=Search
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