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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.
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
I guess if I'd written "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" I'd be modded +5 Insightful.
Yeah, same thing.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
When 90% of the world only access the approved list (BBC, Google, iTunes etc), what the hell do they care?
Given that every poll I've seen has stated that over 50% have illegally downloaded music or video from the Internet (some putting the figure closer to 80%), I think you might be wrong there. If anything, Slashdot users, on average, are probably less likely to commit copyright infringement because a large percentage of us make a living from copyright-related activities.
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