Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule For Copyright Violation

Squeeonline writes "One of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland will make the country the first in the world (according to the broadsheet newspaper the Irish Times) to introduce the 'three strikes' rule. 'Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.' ... The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner. Apparently, IP addresses do not constitute 'personal information.' Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"

Comments

Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[gerry_br]

Rather than analyzing the content of user traffic.

Re:Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[binarylarry]

Or they'll just get drunk at lunch and call it a day!

Re:Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[Bobakitoo]

DMCA notices are ineffective in Europe. Thank you.

Re:Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[binarylarry]

Oh we'll see about THAT!

No one suspects the Digital Millennium Copyright Act!

Re:Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[Zibri]

Yes, but you can still get repoterted to abuse@. I'm pretty sure that's the way they will go. (But ofc, i didn't rtfa.)

Re:Perhaps they will use DMCA notices...

[shnull]

next up : the all-new Irish Inquisition. say your prayers kids ... medieval retards omfg

I'm guessing you'll be cut off

[Kitkoan]

Welcome to guilty by association.

Re:I'm guessing you'll be cut off

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is one Eircom customer they just lost. I phoned up to ask about how this affects my service today and the sales person knew NOTHING.
"Erm well it's only illeagle stuff you know."
"Yeah but who says it's illeagle how do you inspect my traffic?"
"Eh..we have a team who looks at all of your traffic"
"Well thats not true is it? You have a thrid party company inspecting traffic who are on the pay role of content providers"
"Er...I'm not sure..."
"Thanks. I'm swapping to UPC"

Re:I'm guessing you'll be cut off

[currently_awake]

Just because you use encrypted bit-torrent (or whatever) doesn't make you safe. Linux ISO's -are- copywrited, so technically they can cut you off for downloading copywrited material. Lack of -criminal- behavior is no defense against RIAA kickbacks based on performance.

Re:I'm guessing you'll be cut off

[jc42]

Linux ISO's -are- copywrited, so technically they can cut you off for downloading copywrited material.

An even better example might be that Netflix now supplies movies via download, which is faster and cheaper than sending a DVD via post. Those movies are all copyrighted, of course, but Netflix (presumably) has the legal right to send them to you and you have the legal right to download them (if your subscription is up to date).

Maybe what we need is a few good "honeypot" test cases. Set up a few private residences with subscriptions to several such services, and maybe also a couple of linux users who like to keep up with the latest ISOs. They download encrypted copies whenever possible. Keep careful records. When the ISP cuts them off, get their explanation and accusation, and file suit. You might want to check with a local lawyer to make sure you're keeping the right records to convince a court that all your big downloads were legal, and that you're charging the ISP with the right violation of the right local law. Something similar to "consumer fraud" would probably be appropriate, since the ISP probably advertised their download speeds and capacity, and if they don't permit a customer to use it for legal downloads, their ads were fraudulent.

After the ISP has done this a couple of times, you should be able to get the court to agree to punitive damages, contempt of court, whatever.

It could be interesting to read about this. After all, a "no copyrighted material" is a bogus restriction. This message is copyrighted, as it probably says at the bottom of the page you're reading, and all the other messages on this page are copyrighted. Almost every page on the Web is copyrighted, and you didn't get written permission to download any of them, did you? So technically, the entire Web is one bit copyright violation. The only way out, legally speaking, is for the ISP to determine exactly what you're downloading, and also determine whether you have legal permission to download it.

So who wants to be the guinea pig for an experiment with tricking ISPs into blocking downloads of demonstrably legal material? It'll take a bit of organizing, including finding a few interested lawyers who know the relevant law in each jurisdiction.

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally

This simply isn't true.

What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music. There is no decision of legality here because a court is not involved. Were they cutting off people who had been found, by a court of law, to have shared their music in violation of Irish copyright law, then you could use the word 'illegally'.

Journalism is hard though. If it was easy everybody would do it.

Re:Not quite

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off...

So that's four strikes, then.

Re:Not quite

[tsm_sf]

It's nice to see that, instead of logic, we're basing our laws on sports metaphors. This jibes nicely with the level of intellect I assume lawmakers possess.

Re:Not quite

[future assassin]

>What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music.

Well all music is copyrighted including CC licensed music. I have 10 GIGS of CC only music on my computer, are they gonna go after someone who is sharing CC copyrighted music?

Re:Not quite

[thegrassyknowl]

What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music

Which is their right - the ISP has the right as a company to decide who they do and don't provide service to, so long as that is on a non-discriminatory (race, religion, age, gender, etc) basis.

Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence, and even to fabricate evidence when they are losing. It has also been shown that these "infringement notices" do not constitute actual proof that the user did anything wrong, since they're often generated by a machine which scans for filenames and signatures on data that is shared publicly (FTP, HTTP, torrents, etc). Just because I call a file "2012.avi" and the first kilobyte has the same signature as a copy they know is on a torrent server doesn't mean that the whole file is that trite movie. It may just be conveniently the next number in some sequence.

If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.

Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary. Let's see how long it takes them to realise that their three strikes policy is useless.

Re:Not quite

[Opportunist]

No, it's three strikes and then you can go to court and try to prove you're not guilty.

Re:Not quite

[Opportunist]

What's the laws for contracts in Ireland? In my country this would constitute a "considerable change of contract" and allow me to cancel immediately, no matter how much longer I am tied to that ISP.

If Ireland has similar laws, I could forsee that EIRCOM will soon be known as "formerly one of the biggest ISP".

Re:Not quite

[carlzum]

Good point. I wonder how well they'll review the credibility of each "strike"? Expect a flood of copyright notices if they're taken at face value.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Please copy and paste, this is released under the GPL and creative commons.

Re:Not quite

[Grumbleduke]

Well all music is copyrighted...

No, it isn't.
We don't (yet) have indefinite copyright anywhere. In Ireland (as in the UK), the copyright on sound recordings (so MP3s and whatnot) expires 50 years after the recording was made. Obviously, this means works recorded in the 60s will be dropping out of copyright soon. That will include the early works of some rather big names including the Beatles. It is no wonder that the lobbyists are hard at work extending it - screw investing in new bands, mustn't let the stuff they've already bought (and don't have to pay the artists for) become available for free.

Personally, I have quite a bit of music I have downloaded that is not copyrighted.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

No, third warning is that you are cut off...

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

@future assassin,

I look forward to hearing about your case against them, keep good documentation and get the eff or whoever is doing that in your country on your side. Post it up here once your site is up & I'll be happy to DL some CC music as well as upload whatever I have that you don't.
Thanks.

(sorry about the AC but I'm at work)

Re:Not quite

[valros]

Yeah I almost feel safe making a bet that "formerly one of the biggest ISP's" will become a reality.

Re:Not quite

[EdIII]

Which is their right - the ISP has the right as a company to decide who they do and don't provide service to, so long as that is on a non-discriminatory (race, religion, age, gender, etc) basis.

It's Ireland, so I don't know how much competition there is in that country, their feelings on monopolies, and whether or not the Internet constitutes a service that a citizen could live without.

Speaking as an American, I can say I strongly disagree with you in strongest possible terms.

The telecom companies in the US have enjoyed enormous advantages and generous allowances by the government to use public land ostensibly because at some point the citizenry was going to reap the benefits.

This has not happened.

What we have is a wholly corrupt system with the barest possible level of competition, and in some cases, no competition at all. Which is why Net Neutrality so god damned important to keep them from destroying the Internet as it exists now.

Additionally, for many people the Internet has become as indispensable as water, gas, and electricity. I'm not talking about the need to post some banality on Facebook here, but important day to day errands that are increasingly becoming conducted on the Internet. Telecommuting, accessing public information, banking, voip, etc. So many of the services I receive on a day to day basis are entirely Internet based. Jeez, in some cases I even order Pizza on the Internet. In fact, last couple of times I needed something fixed on my house I issued a trouble ticket through a website for my home insurance.

If I am going to be denied access to the Internet, which could effectively cut me off entirely, I damn well fucking deserve my rights to due process. If your a utility company, which most ISPs essentially are at this point, then you get less rights than a normal corporation and that only makes sense.

 

Re:Not quite

[Cryacin]

Well the law has been strongly molded for juries.

Re:Not quite

[FSWKU]

Journalism is hard though. If it was easy everybody would do it.

Judging by the number of self-important blogs out there, everyone TRIES to do it anyway. Proof that both the best and worst aspects of the Internet are that everyone has access.

Re:Not quite

[UnderCoverPenguin]

That is a critical point.

I'm not sure how it would be handled in the US. The contracts (for residential service) I signed for each of the 3 high speed ISPs I have used over the past several years were for monthly service. If my current ISP were to decide I violated a term of the contract, the most I would be out is 1 month's service fee. Not worth my time to pursue in court - even if I was guaranteed to win.

As for long term contracts - in other contexts - it is typical to include a clause that the customer is still liable for the full price of the contract in the even the supplier terminates the contract for cause. I have no idea if any of the ISPs in my area offer long term contracts, nor if their customers (if any) under such contracts have tried to challenge the price liability clause.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Irish.
Irish who?
Irish I wasn't the disconnection leprechaun... *poof* -UNABLE TO CONNECT-

Re:Not quite

[tuomoks]

Yes, it is! ("Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.") All creative work is by default copyrighted, even if not marked so. Does the owner care, let others use the work, force copyright, release the copyright to a third party, whatever is up to the copyright owner or owners legal representative but even these lines are owned by me (not very creative but I digress) - not by Slashdot! We don't want Slashdot to be responsible what I write - or do we? And of course, writing the lines here I will allow everyone to use them but they still are copyrighted to me, I just gave a permission to use them by my (kind of) agreement with Slashdot.

Re:Not quite

[Stormie]

In my country this would constitute a "considerable change of contract"..

I guarantee you that the current contract contains some nebulous terms stating that they may cancel your connection based on unspecified abuse of the network, which this new rule would fit nicely into.

Re:Not quite

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Beyond checking some log that a file matching the specified name and size was transferred at the specified time by the specified IP address, I doubt the ISPs have the ability to do anything other than take the notices at face value.

I do find it interesting that ISPs have, so far, resisted banning P2P usage. One possible outcome of this is that ISPs will decide that banning p2p is easier than dealing with the floods of notices and complaints.

Re:Not quite

[AliasMarlowe]

Well all music is copyrighted

Is or was under copyright. But this is often irrelevant. I have several GiB of copyrighted music downloaded for free with the permission of the artists. No restrictions were placed on use of these tracks, so they would probably be free to share also. FWIW, it is several years of the artists' sample/promotional tracks from http://www.sxsw.com/, and if you search you can probably find torrents with all of them.

An interesting question is whether - should one of these bands be signed by a major - they could retroactively claim restrictions on use. For example, in 2015 it might be difficult to effectively dispute DMCA-style notices or three-strikes warnings on those tracks which were made available by the artists for free download between 2003 and 2010.

Re:Not quite

[Shadow_139]

The are also the ONLY company that you have get a physical PSTN line if you want ADSL from ANYBODY. This is because they own the last-mile of copper to everyone's house. This was a state run company under a few years ago.

Re:Not quite

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Additionally, for many people the Internet has become as indispensable as water, gas, and electricity.

I know a lot of people who have been unemployed long enough that they can't afford to pay for even "life line" telephone service, so have been cut off from phone service. (The cost of life line phone service is comparable to the lowest cost cell phone service I know of, so they are effectively cut off from all phone service.) Therefore, I seriously doubt that even dirt cheap dial up internet service would be considered an essential service. (Further, I frequently hear about families being cut off from water, gas and electricity as well.)

My guess is that the argument will be that there are enough libraries, free WiFi hot spots and other places where people can get free internet access that cutting off access from home is at most an inconvenience. (Not that I am agreeing, only pointing out.)

(Note that free WiFi is not necessarily the same as open WiFi. Example, the libraries in my area require patrons to use their library card number to log in when connecting to the library's hot spot. The library cards are free upon applying for one, so the access is free of charge, though they have your personal identifying information.)

Re:Not quite

[failedlogic]

More to this, as an example, some major telcos are providing not only DSL access but *also* provides cell phone service (which most if not now all can access the Internet). And more and more, for arguments' sake, subscriptions for convergence devices like the iPad, Amazon Kindle that are all 'more functional' with Internet.

I wonder if you download MP3s on your PC will your cell be cut off on Internet/data or vice versa. Parents will unfairly have to assume the burden of monitoring their children's Internet access to ensure that they do not download any MP3s (legal or not, to avoid being cut-off). There's also a lot of ISPs that provide unsecured wireless routers with their service. Living in an apartment, its really easy to get free Internet access (yes it constitutes stealing), but that negates that if your router is hacked or improperly secured that anyone can download MP3s from your computer.

There is way too much economic activity (shopping, banking, stock market, personal business, e-mail, applying for jobs, upgrading software) that relies on the Internet. I'd like to think that if a significant amount of Internet users get access cut-off companies like Amazon, Ebay, Dell, Apple and Visa (there are way too many to think of), will see their bottom lines effected. If politicians aren't willing enough to listen to voters, maybe an ass kicking (kissing?) from these companies will far outweigh the schmmozing and political freedoms afforded to the RIAA and MPAA.

Further, about 10 years ago I worked in tech support. The provider at the time, was trying to implement bandwidth caps and had cut off users for high use. There was little in the way of any arbitration or advance notice. It might require something in writing, but if the account were reinstated, it would probably be take over 30 days. They also mentionned that cut-off users names were shared with other ISPs. I'm not sure this is true. Its harder now to find dial-up ISPs and dial up modems. Get cut-off a DSL or Cable only high-speed provider and you only have one of the two to choose from in your neighborhood and you're totally screwed.

I'm all for everyone getting a fair share of the pie (I'm more in favor of Artists getting it), but cutting people of the Internet or threating $100 million lawsuits ain't it.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument boils down to "some poor person doesn't have it, therefore it is not essential".

I could counter your claim with "some people don't clean water, is it therefore not essential?", but that would really only highlight your (deliberate?) misunderstanding. The GP clearly explained in what respect he believes Internet access to be essential: it is about having the basics to be able to participate in our (modern) society.

Re:Not quite

[brainiac ghost1991]

errr... if you read his post he said in all countries copyright expires!

Re:Not quite

[rippeltippel]

In Ireland (as in the UK), the copyright on sound recordings (so MP3s and whatnot) expires 50 years after the recording was made

Allegedly in UK expires after 50 years if the author is dead, or 70 years after his/her/their death.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Eircom used to have a monopoly (the only true monopoly - a state granted one) but there has been some deregulation. They own most of the "last mile" and most of the other miles to go with it, but are forced to wholesale to competition by the somewhat lame regulators.

Re:Not quite

[jimicus]

No, it's three strikes and then you can go to court and try to prove you're not guilty.

I'm not Irish (I'm actually English), but I'm not sure about this.

Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please. I'm not even sure you could get a court order to reinstate your broadband.

I'm having difficulty seeing how policies like this marry up with the due process of the law - as far as I can tell they don't.

Re:Not quite

[bikin]

There is some competition; at least in the large cities you have multiple operators over DSL and cable service. Eircom thas a huge advantage, though, given that it is also the phone operator, so when you request a phone line installed, changed, etc. etc. they try to upsell you their own internet service.

Re:Not quite

[jimicus]

Allegedly in UK expires after 50 years if the author is dead, or 70 years after his/her/their death.

IIRC it's not as simple as that. I think the copyright over the recorded performance lasts for 50 years but the copyright over the actual lyrics and music lasts for some time after the artist dies.

Which means that while Cliff Richard could continue to collect royalties from anyone wanting to do a cover of his early work (assuming he wrote it), a radio station could set up playing recordings of his early work and not pay him a thing.

The only question I would pose to any politician regarding this is: "How come everyone else is legally obliged to put away a percentage of the money I earn so I'm not a burden on the state when I'm too old to work yet musicians are exempt?"

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you can get damages for breach of contract if you can give proof of their misusing of the three strikes policy

^ I would like to see how you're going to prove it, however.

Re:Not quite

[Hognoxious]

Didn't the EU recently rule that internet access was a human right? If so Eircom are looking to get very heavy fines if they cut anybody off.

Re:Not quite

[smallfries]

If you insist on ADSL this is true, but why would ADSL be preferable to cable?

Re:Not quite

[DiarmuidBourke]

It's Ireland, so I don't know how much competition there is in that country, ...

Eircom is a monopoly here, in that it has control over the exchanges (it's control over exchanges is being taken away, but its still relied upon for networking engineering works). I'm currently waiting on Eircom to hand over control of my phone line to another broadband provider, so that I can have decent access to the interent. However, even with my new operator, I'm still paying Eircom line rental charges of €25.36 per month. This represents the biggest failure of our communications regulator in that they failed to properly remove control of the network from Eircom. What the regulator should have done is taken a look at our Electricity market, the incumbent ESB has been split into ESB Networks and ESB Customer Care. This allows us to choose any Electricity provider while retaining a neutral network operator. Eircom should have been split up the same way. Instead we're left with a pseudo deregulated telecoms market and network infrastructure that has no incentive to be upgraded.

Re:Not quite

[Tim C]

No, it most certainly is not.

Who owns the copyright on the compositions of Bach or Mozart, for example?

As the GP says, copyright expires. Everything is copyrighted at some point, but everything eventually passes into the public domain. That is the bargain that was struck, and that is the bargain that (large parts of) the content-producing industry is fighting to renege on.

Re:Not quite

[ultranova]

Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please. I'm not even sure you could get a court order to reinstate your broadband.

So that's the real reason behind privatization - when everything's private, you can enforce arbitrary rules by withholding access to various parts of society as punishment and say it's okay because the government is not directly involved.

It's pretty ingenious, really.

Re:Not quite

[tuomoks]

Correct - my mistake, sorry!

Re:Not quite

[Richard_at_work]

Water, gas and electricity are already 'human rights', but utility companies have been able to cut off non-payers and abusers without issue.

Re:Not quite

[buchner.johannes]

Why? It's not like it's the only option to get Internet access.
Just because they don't let you in McD anymore doesn't mean you're gonna starve. On a related note, that restaurants demand money also doesn't violate you're human rights.

Re:Not quite

[Animaether]

Your having a 'right to internet access' does not mean another party has a duty to give that access to you. If it did, then nobody would pay for internet access.. just demand that party X hook you up; after all, it's 'a right'.

Not that I agree with cutting off (limiting bandwidth would be a much better option)- but if your connection at home is cut off, that doesn't mean you can't still go to an internet café, a library, etc. for internet access.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get list of Eircom customers
2. Report all customers to Eircom three times.
3. Profit (not for Eircom).

Re:Not quite

[LordSnooty]

Obviously, this means works recorded in the 60s will be dropping out of copyright soon. That will include the early works of some rather big names including the Beatles.

And when the extension attempts fail, they just remix the original album very slightly, commission a big marketing campaign and BOOM! Everyone buys the same old crap for the sixth time, and the labels can exert its new copyright over this slightly different sound recording for another 50 years.

Re:Not quite

[Animaether]

I could forsee that EIRCOM will soon be known as "formerly one of the biggest ISP".

Similar to how PS3 sales have dropped and millions of users went to the store they purchased their PS3 from to return it when SONY removed the 'other os' option?

Please. There's going to be a handful of people making it a point to cancel their contract, some of those are going to be vocal about it on their blog, and the rest of the subscribers are either not going to care, or do care but check the alternatives and find that the alternatives bring with them other negative points (higher costs, for example) and decide they don't care enough.

This is only going to have a major impact once people -are- getting cut off, and even then only when they're getting cut off improperly; otherwise it's just a matter of "well you -did- share those files.. it's not like you didn't know this could happen, you got two warnings before.. the mistake you made was getting caught - three times. Tough luck, buddy."

Re:Not quite

[JohhnyTHM]

Water, gas and electricity are already 'human rights', but utility companies have been able to cut off non-payers and abusers without issue.

I can't comment on gas or electricity, but in the UK you absolutley cannot turn off someones water supply. It is classed as a basic human need for survival. Unfortunately, some people try to use this as a way to get out of paying their water bill.

Re:Not quite

[Pharmboy]

Well the law has been strongly molded for juries.

Is that why most patent infringement suits take place in East Texas?

Re:Not quite

[Grumbleduke]

If you want to check, the relevant bit of law is Section 13A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended by the The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003) which states:

(2) ... copyright expires—

(a) at the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the recording is made, or

(b) if it is released before the end of that period, 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which it is released, or

(c) if during that period the recording is not published but is made available to the public by being played in public or communicated to the public, 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which it is first so made available,

While various minor Acts (mainly based on EU directives or international treaties) have extended the duration of written works to life+70 from the life+50 in the original Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, so far, duration of copyright on sound recordings has escaped largely untouched. Of course, it is still a long way from the original 14+14 years, but it is something.

Re:Not quite

[Spad]

Which makes perfect sense in Europe, which is world renowned for its love of Baseball...

Re:Not quite

[Grumbleduke]

Very nearly right, but just to be picky;

Which means that while Cliff Richard could continue to collect royalties from anyone wanting to do a cover of his early work (assuming he wrote it), a radio station could set up playing recordings of his early work and not pay him a thing.

That highlighted bit should be "assuming he owns the copyright". Since the Copyright Act 1842 (an evil piece of legislation, to blame for much of our copyright problems today) copyright has counted as property and so can be bought and sold.

If someone else owns the copyright, it is them you must pay royalties to, no matter who wrote it. This is why, for example, EMI can refuse to publish the Beatles collection on iTunes or any other download service even though both the remaining Beatles would quite like this to happen.

Re:Not quite

[Opportunist]

The question is now whether this only constitute a termination of contract (in this case you would be right) or whether there are other strings attached as demanded by the proponents of such three strikes laws, like the customer having to still pay for the time of his "timeout" (i.e. contract remaining in effect but him being not allowed to use it) and the ban of signing up with another provider.

In the latter two cases, this requires a law to back it up, else Eircom opens itself up to some interesting lawsuits.

Re:Not quite

[Opportunist]

I don't know about Irish laws, but such a clause would not hold in court here. At the very least they would have to define "abuse" since our legal system would not accept it as a "widely known and generally accepted" term in context with internet use.

Else an ISP could call it abuse if you chose to use a certain protocol and snip your cord after a month with 2 years of contract still hanging over your head. Don't you think they'd do that in a nanosecond if they could?

Re:Not quite

[Muros]

Re-read your own link. "50 years after release or if not released 50 years after making (sound recordings) "

Re:Not quite

[Opportunist]

Talk for your country. It takes a LOT to be cut off from gas and power here. It's nearly impossible to lose your water.

In short, it's easier for your landlord to kick you out of your flat than for the water company to cut off your supply. It's far more likely that you get evicted before the water company gets the ok to let your pipes run dry. Hence they don't bother anymore. If you don't pay, they contact your landlord and warn him that you don't pay, and pretty soon you get a note from him that he wants you to pack your stuff and go.

Re:Not quite

[turbidostato]

"Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please."

No they don't.

They are private company, making bussiness in a *regulated* market.

They can't (and shouldn't) do bussiness with whoever they please but with whoever its market regulations stablish.

Re:Not quite

[ionix5891]

I'm from Ireland

unfortunately Eircom (ex state owned Telecom Eireann)

own almost all of the coper/phone network in country

outside the big cities (where you can get cable with UPC) the choice boils down (assuming your close enough to exchange...) to Eircom or wireless

thats if your lucky enough to have either, since most of the country is very sparsely populated

i am moving to the countryside soon, so i wont have much choice...

Re:Not quite

[L4t3r4lu5]

Who owns the copyright on the compositions of Bach or Mozart

The Deutsch Recording Association of Germany.

All of the German labels are in DRAG.

Re:Not quite

[bigtomrodney]

Cable is not available everywhere in Ireland. UPC (formerlay NTL and/or Chorus) are the providers of cable broadband and TV in Ireland but they tend to stick to large urban areas like Dublin, Cork, Galway etc.

There are other smaller services such as Lastmile outside of the cities and Clearwire and IrishBroadband both supply wireless broadband - the problem being that all of these asshats seem to focus on the same areas and leaving rural and small-town Ireland with leftover scraps. ADSL is still one of the most widely available broadband services and again this may be indirectly through Eircom though without this three-strick nonsense.

Mobile broadband is taking off more and more here but costwise and in terms of cap it is not the most attractive service available.

Re:Not quite

[Stormie]

Why on earth would they? Most companies like having customers, and aren't actually looking for an opportunity to get rid of them. Anyway, as an aside, the terms of service of my (Australian) ISP state that they may "immediately suspend, cancel or restrict the supply of the Service" if they "reasonably suspect fraud or other illegal conduct by you or any other person in connection with the Service", or "reasonably believe a threat or risk exists to the security of the Service or the integrity of our Network or a Supplier's Network and that threat or risk is caused directly or indirectly by you". Pretty broad terms, and pretty standard, as far as I know?

Re:Not quite

[bigtomrodney]

If you are paying line rental to Eircom still it is because you have at least in name retained their phone service. While it's an absolute joke that we have to do that I'd recommend moving your phone service to your new ISP. I am with Vodafone (formerly BT) and I get a pretty good deal.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

oh feel free to take the ISP to court and fight the case properly, with a lawyer.
But nobody weill, because the overwhelming majority of the people who get accused are guilty as hell and they know it.

I have zero sympathy for people routinely helping themseleves to everyone else's work, then crying alligator tears about getting caught doing it.

Tough

Fucking

Shit

Re:Not quite

[DiarmuidBourke]

No, I'm paying Eircom because I have an active phone line. I do not have any phone service running on that line. The only service that will be provided is Magnet Broadband. I have looked at Vodaphones home broadband products and they're inclusive of the line rental charge to Eircom. It just happens that Vodaphone/Magnet are the ones transferring the payment to Eircom.

Re:Not quite

[1u3hr]

Who owns the copyright on the compositions of Bach or Mozart
The Deutsch Recording Association of Germany.

No, they may own the copyrights of recent recordings of performances, but not of the compositions. Anyone could perform them now without payment.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Adelphia did this method back in the mid 2000s.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the right to not support this business by canceling your service. No one forces you to use them.

Re:Not quite

[Shagg]

In reality, they're going to go after whoever the European equivalent of the RIAA tells them to go after. They don't care what type of music you have, or even if it is copyrighted at all. If the RIAA claims you shared music illegally, then they will cut off your service.

Yes, this bypasses any sort of due process, but that's the whole point. A 3 strikes law wouldn't need to exist if they were interested in following due process. If a court finds you guilty, 1 strike would be enough. This way, they don't need to bother with any of that "innocent until proven guilty" or "evidence" nonsense.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately in ireland eircom is the ex-monopolist and it is the only available ISP for a huge percentage of the population - including myself!

Re:Not quite

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Yes, it is all copyrighted. The copyright is in two parts; the original recording © and the publishing (lyrics and composition) circle P symbol.

If you have the rights to both, or you have an agreement with the other copyright holder, you can do whatever you want with it -give it away for free, put under a creative commons so it is easy for people to understand, or keep it all rights reserved.

For the UK, the recording copyright is 50 years from the date of the release. Publishing is longer, 70 years from the end of the calendar year from the date of when the writer died.

Re:Not quite

[ultranova]

You have the right to not support this business by canceling your service. No one forces you to use them.

Indeed. You can punish yourself and voluntarily suffer the same penalty that a corporation can impose upon you. That'll show them!

This entire "you don't have to do business with them" was a valid argument back when businesses were small and plentiful; nowadays it's complete rubbish. You either get Internet access through whatever provider has monopoly in your area - if you're really lucky, there might be two or even three, but of course they like to coordinate to discourage meaningful choice - or not at all. For all intents and purposes, a corporation - especially an ISP, but really any corporation - is a branch of government: you do business with it or not at all. The only difference is lack of any oversight.

Like I said, it's bloody ingenious.

Re:Not quite

[mpe]

What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music.

A third party firm who apparently face no consequences when they get it wrong. Which means they have even less reason to ensure they get things right.

There is no decision of legality here because a court is not involved. Were they cutting off people who had been found, by a court of law, to have shared their music in violation of Irish copyright law, then you could use the word 'illegally'.

Falsely accusing people of breaking the law does tend to have consequences. Especially when it's civil law (which may be why the entertainments industry wants to make copyright infringement criminal.)

Re:Not quite

[mpe]

I'm not Irish (I'm actually English), but I'm not sure about this.
Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please.

But if they choose to do business they have to comply with the "law of the land" in respect of any contracts they enter into.
Being a "private company" dosn't magically absolve them of this.

Re:Not quite

[jimicus]

Yes, I accept that.

So where in the law of the land does it say that someone - anyone - has to provide broadband access?

Re:Not quite

[mpe]

Water, gas and electricity are already 'human rights', but utility companies have been able to cut off non-payers and abusers without issue.

Thing is that "abuse" in this context tends to mean something along the lines of tampering with the distribution system. e.g. bypassing the meter.
Certainly not a poorly substantiated claim from a third party.
You arn't going to get your gas or electricity cut off because the food you are cooking wasn't bought from a major supermarket. Nor is your electricity supplier likely to be interested if the videos/DVDs/etc are "pirate".
About the only thing which might get you cut off would be if you had a "security system" consisting of an electric fence and/or flamethrowers, bu the complaint would have to come from the police...

Re:Not quite

[mpe]

Yes, this bypasses any sort of due process, but that's the whole point. A 3 strikes law wouldn't need to exist if they were interested in following due process. If a court finds you guilty, 1 strike would be enough. This way, they don't need to bother with any of that "innocent until proven guilty" or "evidence" nonsense.

Also there is no risk to the "person" making the accusation. If you sue someone then they can countersue you. If you are a corporation and they are an individual things can easily wind up being more expensive for you. (Especially outside corporate friendly countries such as the USA).

Re:Not quite

[mpe]

Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence,

Courts tend to take a very dim view of suppliers expecting people to pay for nothing. It typically comes under "breach of contract".

If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.

Even in that situation the ISP might still have a tough time doing anything other than stopping service and charging.

Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary.

Unless you happened to be the right entity they'd just ignore you. They'd still ignore you even if you were a non "blessed" copyright holder who had reasonable evidence of copyright violations...

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why? It's not like it's the only option to get Internet access.

Actually in Ireland it pretty much is.

> you're human rights.

No I'm not. I'm Spartacus!

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

you're human rights.

What'd you call me?

Differentiation

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?

Well, since the article talks about searching for people who are sharing (not just downloading) specific works over P2P networks where the copyright is known to be held by the record companies, presumably they are only planning to go after those they've caught in the act.

I'm not a fan of either "three strikes" laws that impose penalties without a proper court hearing or going after people based on an IP address alone, but as the recent round of proposals have gone, this one seems to be about as reasonable as you're going to get in who it claims to be targetting.

Re:Differentiation

[Arker]

Based on what we've seen so far from the Muzak Maffia, they'll most likely just scan for filenames.

I foresee hundreds of well-seeded linux ISOs with filenames remarkably similar to whatever is top of the charts on the week of release...

Re:Differentiation

[powerspike]

Or... you could just send fake infringement notices on every ip address at the isp, they'll either stop doing it, or go out of business...

Re:Differentiation

[10101001 10101001]

I'm not a fan of either "three strikes" laws that impose penalties without a proper court hearing or going after people based on an IP address alone, but as the recent round of proposals have gone, this one seems to be about as reasonable as you're going to get in who it claims to be targetting.

Consider this hypothetical: Sony starts up an ISP in Ireland. They decide to have a "three strikes" rule, where anyone caught sharing Sony music gets banned. Now, along comes Columbia Records. They notice that due to Sony's blatant and wide-spread advertising "We'll ban you if you share Sony music", Sony's ISP is now a large haven for sharing Columbia Records music but no Sony music. Hmm.. That sure looks like a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement (no different, really, than what Napster was slammed under).

The fact that the ISP isn't owned by one or a few music labels doesn't really change the point. They've taken it upon themselves not to ban copyright infringers of music (or even copyright infringers in general) but to selectively pick winners and losers in the "you can get free music and avoid paying a label their [fair or not] share of copyright money*. And unlikely the whole debate over scanning networks for obscene material, the parties in question (a) have lots of money to sue, (b) have lots of precedent for redress in civil court, and (c) are defending material where there isn't some major moral issue which might taint the subject.

In short, good fucking luck with that Eircom. I hope you get sued into the ground by a major label and then--after the Irish RIAA gets their artists named added to the search filter--by indie labels and then--after even most the indie labels with deep enough pockets sue--finally by a few really rich independent musicians. Then we can move onto all the other non-music infringement that they'll be havens for. Good luck filtering the whole internet systematically for all copyright infringement.

*Yea, clearly, it's debatable on whether they deserve a share or not morally, but legally they're in a good position for the courts.

Re:Differentiation

[houghi]

I should only be guilty if the legal system in my country says so. And even then it should be that legal system says what my punishment is. If I would be a repeatable offender, cutting me off might be a possible punishment.

A private company should NOT been able to tell if I am guilty of whatever to another company and then have the other company act on it. I do not care if they have videotape of me admitting me downloading 10 gazillion songs AND showing them on that tape how I do it AND give them a written statement signed by several witnesses. It will make a weak case for me in court, but that is the ONLY place who should be able to tell if I am guilty or not.

Re:Differentiation

[wvmarle]

They are always after IP addresses... as if that is so clearly identifiable.

My previous ISPs gave me a de-facto static IP (in name dynamic but it didn't change much, less than once a year, and usually after network maintenance works).

My current ADSL connection at home has a dynamic IP and with dynamic they mean dynamic. I have a router which is connected all the time, but my IP address changes all the time, as in every day or even more frequently, I haven't tried to keep track of that but all the time I wrote down my IP address to allow me to connect back to home the next day it had changed. Quite irritating. Makes this kind of monitoring quite hard I'd guess.

Re:Differentiation

[Joce640k]

]"IP addresses... as if that is so clearly identifiable. "

Um, geeky nitpicking aside, that's because they mostly *are* clearly identifiable. The only real exception would be where a large number of machines is hidden behind a NAT router. In that case it would be hard to pick out an individual machine from the external Internet but that situation is hardly ever the case for home users.

The other oft-quoted excuse is if somebody else is using your WiFi to download music. In this case you get two opportunities to secure your access point before they cut you off.

]"my IP address changes all the time, as in every day or even more frequently"

So? I bet your ISP has a log of when a particular IP address was assigned to you. The RIAA will send them IP address + time of day, and, Bingo!

Re:Differentiation

[Joce640k]

Ummm...did you mean: "I foresee hundreds of well-seeded .avi files with filenames identical to well-known Linux ISOs."?

Re:Differentiation

[baegucb]

Slightly off-topic but oh well. Leave your home PC signed into gmail. When at work, sign onto gmail, and at the bottom of the screen it will tell you the IP address of anywhere else you are signed on (and the history under Details). Saves time looking up and writing down the IP address, and I don't have to ask my wife to look it up when I'm at work.

Re:Differentiation

[Anonymous Coward]

I foresee hundreds of well-seeded linux ISOs with filenames remarkably similar to whatever is top of the charts on the week of release...

You activated my trap card!!!11

That's still trademark infringement.

Re:Differentiation

[smallfries]

To solve your problem go and sign up for a free dyndns.org account. Very useful.

When the infringement notice is generated I'd assume that there is a timestamp on it. Even if the ISP switches your IP they will keep a record of which customer that IP was assigned to at each time, so no trouble for them to map it backwards.

Re:Differentiation

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched a band three times. Now they won't sell me tickets anymore because I remembered the show and took the memories home with me.

Re:Differentiation

[TeraCo]

In short, good fucking luck with that Eircom. I hope you get sued into the ground by a major label

So you're saying that a 'major label' is going to sue the first 'copyright friendly' ISP in Ireland 'into the ground'. Are you high? What will actually happen is the lawyers from 'a major label' will call the lawyers from the ISP and say 'hey, how can we get in on this copyright protection thing you've got going on, we need a few really high profile busts'.

Re:Differentiation

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, geeky nitpicking aside, that's because they mostly *are* clearly identifiable. The only real exception would be where a large number of machines is hidden behind a NAT router. In that case it would be hard to pick out an individual machine from the external Internet but that situation is hardly ever the case for home users.

No, the most significant "exception" is malicious users. Some botnet operator who decides it's safer to use your infected computer as a proxy for his illicit downloads. Some asshat on the same cable segment as you, or who works for some ISP somewhere, who can spoof your IP address and still see the return path for the packets.

IP addresses aren't designed to identify people. They're designed to route packets, which only requires knowing the next hop, not the actual destination. If the packets get diverted anywhere after the next hop, you have no way of knowing.

Re:Differentiation

[wvmarle]

I have the feeling that the ISP is doing this more using the following reasons:

1) preventing being sued by record companies for being accomplice in copyright infringement,

2) having a nice excuse to cut-off their heaviest users, saving a nice dime on their own uplink.

Remember they are a private company, and as such have the sole discretion to accept you as customer or not. They are not a public utility, not a government office, they are a private company. If the ISP doesn't like you for whatever reason (e.g. putting them at risk of copyright violation law suits) then they can simply stop doing business with you.

Re:Differentiation

[NotQuiteInsane]

And what about clock skew?

Let's say you're online from 5PM to 5:30PM, and someone else gets your IP address when they log in at 5:31PM, and immediately kicks off Bittorrent, Gnutella or whatever.

The Appointed Enforcement Agency's clock says someone downloaded an infringing MP3 at 5:29. But their clock is three minutes behind the ISP's clock -- it was the guy who logged in at 5:31 who downloaded the MP3, not you.

So you get whacked with the banhammer for something someone else did. And how can you prove your innocence in this case?

Computer and router clocks have (relatively speaking) TERRIBLE accuracy. This is NOT outside the realms of possibility. An ISP may well lock the clocks on their servers together with NTP or something, and if they really care (most don't) they'll do the same for routers. If they really, REALLY care they'll lock against a Stratum 1 or 2 time source like MSF, NIST or GPS.

But the MAFIAA probably don't care much for accurate time, and their clocks are almost guaranteed not to match the ISP's. They're probably just COTS PCs, with no clock synching to speak of.

For bonus points, factor in clock drift over time. The 'standard' is a 32.768KHz crystal divided by 32768. Not all crystals will oscillate at the same frequency -- and they're well known to be temperature dependant. Ever wondered why your watch keeps better time than your PC? Hint: body heat. (the temperature inside a PC case varies with ambient temperature, CPU load and a ton of other factors).

So yes the IP address at a given time *is* a valid way of identifying a specific customer, but if and ONLY IF your Big Evil Enforcement Agency(tm) and the ISP have synch'ed their clocks together really, REALLY well...

3 strikes isn't so bad

[Vinegar Joe]

They could always kneecap you with a Black and Decker.

Re:3 strikes isn't so bad

[Opportunist]

If they don't mind that I reply with a Heckler and Koch...

Re:3 strikes isn't so bad

[BlueStrat]

If they don't mind that I reply with a Heckler and Koch...

I don't think even an H&K has a large enough magazine capacity.

Maybe several banks of General Dynamics miniguns belt-fed from a deuce-and-a-half or six?

Nah.

Take off and nuke the facilities from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Strat

exetel in australia

[Anonymous Coward]

exetel in australia had 3 strikes rule at least 2 years ago. I got blocked twice each time you have to make up an excuse for it. i.e. wireless is not secure.

however after iinet's court case they have removed their 3 strike system

Re:exetel in australia

[UnderCoverPenguin]

And you got away with that excuse twice?

Re:exetel in australia

[thegarbz]

The execs of some of our ISPs are absolute idiots. Imagine how dumb the front line staff are. That and maybe they don't want to lose a paying customer. I'm sure the excuse was collected only for the benefit of the lawyers.

Re:exetel in australia

[wvmarle]

You got blocked twice?

Which means you didn't switch to another ISP already?

Abortion is still illegal

[KahabutDieDrake]

In Ireland. So a bit of censorship and or corporate protectionism (depending on how far you lean) isn't a big surprise. I am a bit shocked that anyone is upset by this. I'm as big a sharer as the next guy (god damn it people SEED!!!) but if that 'sharing' is in violation of local law, the idea isn't to do it surreptitious, it's to change the local laws. As long as our activity is technically illegal, it's going to be policed. The more money involved the better the policing is going to be. There is a LOT of money in music.

Ireland will be a test bed, and if it goes even remotely well, this program will expand to most of the EU and north america. I'm not sure how enthusiastic the ISPs will be about cutting off customers, however, I am sure that they will ham it up to get the highest possible "operational costs" from the RIAA and their ilk, to cover expenses, of course.

I am also not sure why anyone would think their unencrypted data isn't already being inspected. That's just naive. There doesn't need to be a good reason, there just needs to be a WAY, and we all know there is. So it's just a little bit foolish to think that your OPEN traffic isn't already being scanned at the very least by a machine, and probably occasionally by a human if the machine flags enough activity as "bad". Is it against the law for the ISP to scan the traffic? Depends where you live, and how you define scan. In the US, the ISP can pretty much snoop as they please under the guise of Network Operations monitoring. They would be sued if they released private info, or if they used it in public against the customer, but turning it over to law enforcement (or a corporation pretending to be a law enforcement agency), isn't likely to get them in all that much hot water, legally speaking. They have already been doing it for years, and I can't imagine why they would stop. It's not like there is an ISP you can use that doesn't traverse ATT/Comcast, and or would vow to protect your plain text communications in the first place.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Grumbleduke]

Also, Ireland even has a shiny, new blasphemy law. But anyway;

There isn't actually a lot of money in music. People think there is, (and the large record labels would like to believe it) but there isn't. In 2009, according to the BPI's figures, the entire UK recorded music industry revenue was less than GBP1bn. That's for all their recorded music (CD sales, music videos, legal downloads, ad- and subscription-based services, the whole lot) for an entire year. A top film will make nearly that much. EMI (the UK's one, failing contribution to the "big four" - and the smallest one) made more than that in 2009 (actually, it even announced pre-tax losses of more than that; but that is more due to its screwed up investments and legal battles with its own musicians, or former musicians).

While $1bn may sound like a lot to you or me, on a corporate level, it is hardly anything - there really isn't that much money in actually selling recorded music to normal people. Normal people don't have that much money.

Moving on; yes, this will be an interesting case and will likely be hailed as a success and great progress tomorrow by the IFPI and all their little friends; in fact, it will probably be used to support their efforts in forcing through something similar under the UK's Digital Economy Act. These measures will not work for two reasons. Firstly, they won't stop file-sharing without causing a huge fuss (and likely leading to an even greater backlash against the lobbyists). There will always be loop-holes, there will always be unlicensed file-sharing while it still more convenient. Secondly, even if people stop sharing, they won't naturally move to paying for stuff (and they certainly won't be downloading from iTunes or using Spotify if their Internet has been cut off for a year).

The only people who will win here are the lobbyists (who can get nice big bonuses for getting their laws passed) and the lawyers who will be spending the next 10-15 years trying to untangle the mess it creates in the local, national and European courts. Stopping piracy through legislation and litigation isn't going to work, nor has it ever worked.

Incidentally, I am doing something to stop things like this; I am a member of my local Pirate Party and will be meeting with Ofcom (the UK's communication regulator who has been tasked with drafting - or just using the BPI's draft of - our n-strikes law) to explain to them why they will be unable to carry out the requirements made of them.

What are you doing to stop this sort of thing?

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Grumbleduke]

I don't really want to get involved with this debate, but that is the same logic that brought us: copyright infringement = stealing, stealing = crime hence copyright infringement = crime.

You're confusing the lay-person and lawyer definition of "murder". I assume you justify abortion = murder by working with "life begins at conception". I'm not sure about the legal jurisdiction you are in, but here in England it is my understanding that, legally (for the purposes of liability etc.) life actually begins at birth. Whether or not you agree with it, that is the law. Incidentally, this means (iirc) that if someone was to stab a pregnant woman and kill the foetus (but not the woman), they couldn't be charged with murder or manslaughter, or any charge involving harm to the foetus. But IAmalsNAL: I am merely a law student, not a lawyer so I could be wrong.

But yes, probably best modded offtopic and left alone.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[shentino]

They could still be charged with aggravated assault at least.

If the foetus isn't alive, then it's part of the mother's body.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[bikin]

Ireland will be a test bed, and if it goes even remotely well, this program will expand to most of the EU and north america. I'm not sure how enthusiastic the ISPs will be about cutting off customers, however, I am sure that they will ham it up to get the highest possible "operational costs" from the RIAA and their ilk, to cover expenses, of course. To cover expenses per instance they will try to go after their customers too :-)

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[DMoylan]

when you try to access piratebay.org from eircom you are get a page which says amongst other things

eircom would like to reassure customers that:

        * eircom will not monitor customer's activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.
        * eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.

of course this is the same isp that setup wifi for their customers with next to no encryption;
http://www.mulley.net/2007/10/01/150000-eircom-modems-can-have-their-password-guessed-how-will-eircom-react/

so i guess it's time to find where the politicians live and use their wifi to download a ton of crappy music.

ironically a musician here in ireland i occasionly do tech support for says that he knows almost no musician in ireland that uses legit software.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Grumbleduke]

They can be charged with some sort of offence against the mother (up to and including attempted murder, depending on the circumstances) but nothing against the foetus.

The really interesting part is that if the foetus is then born alive and dies (after a short period), it then counts as a person for that brief time, so it would be murder. Or if it is permanently damaged etc., the person who damaged it would be liable. But if it was stillborn, there could be no liability because it was never alive.

This means that if one is going to attack a pregnant woman and think the foetus might be damaged, (iirc) it is better (in terms of legal consequences) to ensure that the foetus is "killed". Sometimes the law works out in odd ways.

[Again, IANALmals, and this is under English&Welsh law]

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Maxo-Texas]

If they start cutting people off, then many will no longer need high speed internet services. Inexpensive DSL ($15 to $20) is fine for most crap.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowing Dutch ISP's, when this arrives over here they're going to have you pay for your account while you're shut off.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

"if someone was to stab a pregnant woman and kill the foetus (but not the woman), they couldn't be charged with murder or manslaughter, or any charge involving harm to the foetus"

a little further off-topic i know.

Re:Abortion is still illegal

[IRWolfie-]

The burden of proof should be on the corporation who accuses you and be done in a court of law. You should not be cut off the internet without proof by your ISP.

BRILLIANT!

[Anonymous Coward]

..er... not....

The guys who brought us Guinness give us this?

Re:BRILLIANT!

[Concerned Onlooker]

I know. This really gets my ire up.

Re:BRILLIANT!

[Anonymous Coward]

No really, the majority of Eircom is owned by Babcock & Brown, which is an Aussie company

Re:BRILLIANT!

[Anonymous Coward]

*Very deliberately doesn't take the cue, but know that it was a good one.*

Re:BRILLIANT!

[bfree]

Not any more, it is currently owned by Singapore Telecom. It's true though that they were still owned by B&B when this started.

Re:BRILLIANT!

[Kitkoan]

The guys who brought us Guinness give us this?

Not the first drunken mistake made...

be irie

[JackSpratts]

and while they're at it they should ban people from sidewalks when they make their own copies of florsheims.

Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?
>/quote>

We just need to add an illegal-to-download MP3 to every Linux ISO. Then Eircom won't have this problem.

Re:Simple Solution

[hoggoth]

Don't worry, they will get to Linux soon. Any distro that can play DVDs or decode MP3s or rip a CD or a DVD will be flagged as a problem and get added to the list of things you are not allowed to download.
And I'm sure now that the MPIAA and friends have gotten their way there will be many other organizations lining up with their lobbying contributions to get their favorite vice added to the list as well.

Did I read that Australia is banning pictures of adult women with A-cup sized breasts?
If this ever gets passed here in the U.S.A. I'm sure it will be illegal to download evolution texts soon.

Re:Simple Solution

[Opportunist]

Banning A-cup pics?

Sounds like some politicians sure have a thing for big girls and feel bothered when they have to sort through a lot of small chested girls to get their fix.

Re:Simple Solution

[Ethanol-fueled]

Sounds like some politicians sure have a thing for big girls and feel bothered when they have to sort through a lot of small chested girls to get their fix.

More likely that they break a sweat and feel their heart racing and their trousers tightening as they stumble upon pics of 18 year old Japanese chicks or high school volleyball games.

Then they punish everybody else for their own guilt.

Re:Simple Solution

[Shikaku]

Any distro that can play DVDs or decode MP3s or rip a CD or a DVD will be flagged as a problem and get added to the list of things you are not allowed to download.

Those are not installed by default on Ubuntu. You can download then after agreeing that it's either legal in your country or you alone are willing to take the risk installing them on your machine.

Re:Simple Solution

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Any distro that can play DVDs or decode MP3s or rip a CD or a DVD will be flagged as a problem

Then MS Windows will have to flagged as well.

Re:Simple Solution

[Opportunist]

I found it hilarious when I read the definition of "child porn pic" in our legislative. What did it read? Something along the lines of "if it incites arousal" or something like that, then it's porn.

So, essentially, if a judge gets a boner from a child pic, it's porn. Is it me, or is something wrong about this definition? Or is something wrong with the judge?

Re:Simple Solution

[wvmarle]

No: Windows respects DRM. The OSS world simply ignores those restrictions as soon as they can decode the stuff.

bad, but better then being sued

[timmarhy]

I'd take this over a demand for money any day. as long as i can just change ISP's when i'm banned i'd be ok with this if i was actually sharing copyrighted material. if i was falsly accused i'd be fuming, and there in lies the problem with this approach. they need to be 100% sure a violation is occuring with each warning, and i'm betting they'll fuck it up.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[blackraven14250]

It's only 1 ISP, so you could just switch now and avoid the hassle, if Ireland has multiple options in those areas.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Opportunist]

There's no snowball-in-hell chance that they will NOT fuck it up. To be 100% certain that copyrighted material is being shared, they would have to actually download something from a certain IP and tell the ISP that this IP was infringing. If they have that, why not sue? So what will they do? Either compare hashes or even just go for filenames. Now, could anyone see a reason why a file other than a certain movie could be called "300.avi"?

It's pretty much certain that they will blunder somewhere. The only question now is whether they get away with it.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[bfree]

The important thing to note is that this 1 ISP is the former government monopoly who still runs the last mile of copper upon which nearly all DSL in the country depends. I wonder if they will include the customers of their wholesale DSL customers who to many provide the only opportunity to escape from the clutches of Eircom? The only meaningful competition to them is UPC, mentioned in the article, who run the largest cable tv network in the country.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[KahabutDieDrake]

Lets not be overly dramatic with the example file names shall we? Can you think of a reason why any file other than a certain movie would be called :300[2006]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo OR 300.2006.RETAIL.DVDRip.XviD-FLAiTE OR 300.DVDRip.XviD-MEMFOS ???

I'll grant a certain amount of room with mixed up file names. Lets not get carried away with absurd reductions though.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, could anyone see a reason why a file other than a certain movie could be called "300.avi"?"

It's the file that comes after 299.avi?

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[jimicus]

This has already happened.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Animaether]

In 2003... and they learned nothing from it, since!

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Animaether]

If they have that, why not sue?

Suing costs a lot more money (on both the side of the plaintiff and the defendant).
Suing ties up legal proceedings in whatever court venue would be involved.
Suing would make most people think back of the million dollar lawsuits fought in the U.S. where you're typically better off just paying the extorti...fin...settlement payment.

All of the above are vastly more negative, for both sides, than issuing warning notices (or having them issued) and ultimately having internet access reduced or cut off.

So, bouncing the ball back... why sue?

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Animaether]

People deliberately naming benign files in that manner so as to taunt the RIAA/MPAA/whoever?

Not that it matters - such benign files would get removed at any reasonable indexing site/tracker as being 'fake', and any single user trying to pass off a fragment of the benign file as being part of the proper file will find their fragment hash failing left and right and be rejected.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Opportunist]

Because I want to name it that? Or is that illegal now too, I didn't read my spam lately.

I named my latest holiday movie like that hoping that some shady pirates fall for it. I wanted to aid the MPAA in their quest to eliminate rampart piracy! *sniff* I feel violated, I only wanted to help them! *waaaah*

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Opportunist]

Because it's a good PR weapon? People loathe going to court in Europe. They really, really fear the idea of being the defendent in a court case. Remember all those cease-and-desist scams that blanketed Germany and other countries, where some not-so-reputable attorneys tried to trick people into paying for a service they never signed up for, threatening them to drag them to court? They paid! They paid, even people who don't even have an internet connection paid. Just to NOT be dragged to court.

Europe has a different court-culture than the US. We settle much more easily, the last thing the average European wants is to appear in court. No, not even as plaintiff. That's why companies get away with much more than anywhere else in the world.

Re:bad, but better then being sued

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes, UPC... I wanted to have internet and cable TV with them. I already had the cables, the set top box and the cable modem from the previous tenant, so they just needed to enable the service remotely, still they insisted on the need to send a team of "engineers" to my house.

I had five no-snows because they kept canceling the installation without notifying me, then UPC tried to set up 2 direct debits with my bank, then they started invoicing starting from the date of the first (no-show) installation even if I had no service.

It took me five months to get rid of them and I had to threaten them to go to court.

This is the competition.

How about this question ...

[giorgist]

if every song comes out on youtube
and I can download it as an MP3
Am I pirating music if I can simply get it that way ?

Re:How about this question ...

[newcastlejon]

No. You aren't distributing the work to anyone else, are you?

Re:How about this question ...

[mariushm]

You're over complicating things.

If I hear a song on the radio and i record it am i pirating it ?
If i watch vh1 or mtv and i'm recording the show am i pirating it ?

(we don't even have to get into drm - get a digital camera and record the screen of your tv - you're recording the unique rendition of a television channel performed by your tv )

Re:How about this question ...

[Opportunist]

Huh? You can still record from TV? :)

Seriously. No, you're not pirating. The station paid for the right to broadcast that song, and part of the fair use deal is (ok, was) that it's accepted that people will possibly record this broadcast for their personal use. In some countries, they used this to push a "tape fee" (or in the meantime, CDR/DVD-R fee) where you pay a certain amount per blank DVD to the music industry so this "kinda-sorta-infringment" is covered.

Which has become a very weak joke now that you can't really record anything anymore.

Re:How about this question ...

[srodden]

Under Australian law I believe the answer is still "yes". As our law sees (or at least saw, I doubt it's been updated), hearing and enjoying a broadcast are one thing. Recording something so you can play it back is another. If you want that privilege, you can pay for a copy of the media.

Re:How about this question ...

[Anonymous Coward]

if every song comes out on youtube
and I can download it as an MP3
Am I pirating music if I can simply get it that way ?

Youtube is switching the copyrighted works to the VEVO thing. With VEVO, you can't download shit.

Re:How about this question ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not illegal, you can be sure it will be in a short wile...

After that they gonna shoot people for whistling a song, and probably after that you get imprisoned for talking about a scene in a movie.

And it is just a small step to say you only can play a music CD when you have Windows (TM)(C) on your computer. Every time you use something else you get a $1.000.000.000 fine for every minute you listen to that song. Very reasonable huh? I mean - you don't want something BAD happening to your computer hmm? And - oh dear - that poor children tskkk, tskkk, gottit?

Re:How about this question ...

[jochem_m]

No, you're simply getting low sound quality music :)

Re:How about this question ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't really record anything anymore" was a response to "I'm just recording this for my own personal use...me and my 2 billion friends on the internet"

Re:How about this question ...

[Theaetetus]

No. You aren't distributing the work to anyone else, are you?

This is flat out, one-hundred percent incorrect. There are multiple rights involved in copyright, including the right to distribute, but ALSO including the right to copy and the right to make derivative works. If you rip audio from a copyrighted Youtube video, you're making a derivative work. You're also making a copy. You have committed two acts of infringement. By not distributing, you merely haven't committed three.

Re:How about this question ...

[Opportunist]

And just 'cause someone used it for illegal means makes it OK to take away this right from me?

Our copyright law even states that you may make legal copies for "close personal friends". And no, "the internet people" are NOT your personal friends. But I cannot execute that right anymore. Because at the same time, I must not circumvent copy protections. Albeit, our law states that it is illegal to circumvent "effective" copy protections. Is it "effective" if it can be circumvented?

I'm still waiting for the first precedent. :)

Re:How about this question ...

[Luther Blisset]

If there's a levy to cover for alleged damages caused by an action, then said action cannot be illegal. Illegal actions are to be prosecuted, not overlooked in exchange for a payment. Therefore, in countries where "a certain amount per blank DVD" (or CD, or whatever) is paid, making a copy of copyrighted content falls under "fair use" provisions and is not "kinda-sorta-infringement". In fact, even without a levy in place it could still be fair use.

Re:How about this question ...

[Luther Blisset]

That's assuming that making a copy is infringement, which isn't always necessarily the case. As for derivative works... Is ripping a CD (even an individual song off of that CD) to mp3 files considered "making a derivative work"? I don't think so.

Re:How about this question ...

[Theaetetus]

That's assuming that making a copy is infringement, which isn't always necessarily the case.

Before those goal posts go flying out of sight, remember that the original question was:

if every song comes out on youtube and I can download it as an MP3 Am I pirating music if I can simply get it that way ?

And so yes, provided it's a copyrighted song, making a copy under those circumstances is infringement.

As for derivative works... Is ripping a CD (even an individual song off of that CD) to mp3 files considered "making a derivative work"? I don't think so.

No, it's making a copy. Perhaps you were confused because I mentioned "making a derivative work" in my previous answer. If you rip the audio from a music video, you have not copied the music video. Instead, you have created a derivative work of the video comprising just the soundtrack.

When you rip a CD or a song from a CD, however, you are making a copy. You are also "format-shifting", which is allowable fair use under the Betamax doctrine. You can also be making an archival copy, which is also allowable fair use. These are all fine. They are distinct, however, from ripping audio from a video on YouTube.

As an aside, many have tried the song-vs-album argument in the past. Tenenbaum even tried this argument, saying that because he only copied individual songs, they were only a few minutes out of an hour-long album, so he was "sampling" at best. This, of course, failed. The album is a copyrighted compilation of copyrighted works. The individual songs are copyrighted works themselves.

Re:How about this question ...

[Luther Blisset]

That's assuming that making a copy is infringement, which isn't always necessarily the case.

Before those goal posts go flying out of sight, remember that the original question was:

if every song comes out on youtube
and I can download it as an MP3
Am I pirating music if I can simply get it that way ?

And so yes, provided it's a copyrighted song, making a copy under those circumstances is infringement.

In which country? Certainly not in all of them.

As for derivative works... Is ripping a CD (even an individual song off of that CD) to mp3 files considered "making a derivative work"? I don't think so.

No, it's making a copy. Perhaps you were confused because I mentioned "making a derivative work" in my previous answer. If you rip the audio from a music video, you have not copied the music video. Instead, you have created a derivative work of the video comprising just the soundtrack.

When you rip a CD or a song from a CD, however, you are making a copy. You are also "format-shifting", which is allowable fair use under the Betamax doctrine. You can also be making an archival copy, which is also allowable fair use. These are all fine. They are distinct, however, from ripping audio from a video on YouTube.

Again, in which country? Normally, I'd assume Ireland, since it's the country related to the article, but the original question is unrelated to the article, and therefore such an assumption cannot be made so easily.

As for ripping not being a derivative work, we seem to agree on that. I was just mentioning it because I know a few instances of people trying to change laws so it's a derivative work, following the ridiculous logic that "ripping to a lossy format implies loss of information, and therefore it's no longer the same work so it can't be a copy".

As an aside, many have tried the song-vs-album argument in the past. Tenenbaum even tried this argument, saying that because he only copied individual songs, they were only a few minutes out of an hour-long album, so he was "sampling" at best. This, of course, failed. The album is a copyrighted compilation of copyrighted works. The individual songs are copyrighted works themselves.

*agrees*

Ass Monkies

[Das Auge]

What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?

Re:Ass Monkies

[PopeRatzo]

A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?

Well, at least they're only talking about cutting off broadband access.

One wonders if the RIAA started by asking for the death penalty and was then negotiated down to the digital banishment.

If the Irish ask real nice, maybe some of us who live in the rapidly shrinking number of countries where the entertainment industry hasn't completely seized sovereignty can send them the files they want via burned CD-ROMs.

I hope, from my heart, that the entertainment industry is forced out of business. I have no worries that there will no longer be music or movies in the world. We forget that there was music (and movies!) before there was a massive industry to get rich off them.

Re:Ass Monkies

[westlake]

We forget that there was music (and movies!) before there was a massive industry to get rich off them.

The box office for a Chaplin short in 1915 was $100,000.

Roughly $2 million, adjusted for inflation.

During 1915, the Charlie Chaplin craze stormed the United States. Essanay vigorously promoted Chaplin's image, creating merchandise from photocards to books to toys, sheet music, fan cards,. All authorized merchandise stamped with Essanay name, and where possible the studios Indian-head logo. Star paraphernalia as an idea was not new, but the body of Chaplin merchandise was unlike anything seen in film before. Charles Chaplin

P.T. Barnum had perfected the system before 1850. Jenny Lind's net for her first concert tour in the states was $250,000. $3.6 tax-free millions, adjusted for inflation.

Re:Ass Monkies

[Anonymous Coward]

"What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?"

Oh come on, 5 months from now we'll be reading about how the ISP is seeking bankrupcy protection.

Re:Ass Monkies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's exactly what is happening. The entertainment industries need practically no natural resources, just some space to work and electrical power - copyright law is the only differentiating factor between countries when deciding where to set up shop. It's not so obvious recently but a few years ago world intellectual property law was a straight out competition to give the best return on creating data and so attract media companies.

Re:Ass Monkies

[Chrisq]

A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?

Well, at least they're only talking about cutting off broadband access.

You haven't heard the breaking news then. The RIAA have just hired Lorena Bobbitt as an enforcement strategy adviser.

Re:Ass Monkies

[ultranova]

What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?

Well, yeah. Whatever made you think democracy would last forever? It's not the first form of government, nor will it likely be the last; it seems we're heading towards some combination of plutocracy and corporatism.

Oh well, one more reason to use TOR and Freenet.

Re:Ass Monkies

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multinational dominion of dollars. Petrol dollars, electro dollars, multi-dollars. Reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic, and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone!

Am I getting through to you?

You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit and which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Network (1976)

Re:Ass Monkies

[Philip_the_physicist]

If they're trying to encourage corporate growth, they might even be going about it the wrong way. IIRC, in about 1999, a Liberal-aligned (for the rest of the world, this means conservative) think-tank released a report which showed that, ignoring the sanctions which would probably be imposed, Australia would, as a whole, have a better balance of trade and higher economic growth if they abandoned copyright altogether(and other countries did so reciprocally). Their conclusion was essentially that the only economic reason for having copyright in Australia was that they would be punished by the US if they didn't.

Re:Ass Monkies

[PopeRatzo]

The box office for a Chaplin short in 1915 was $100,000.

So, you think Chaplin made the first movies?

Re:Ass Monkies

[currently_awake]

General rule: when people do strange things just follow the money to know why. Odds are the Riaa/Mpaa are payrolling the -experiment-.

Re:Ass Monkies

[c 0xFF]

So ... after three strikes you're left with only two balls?

Good luck with that

[rubies]

Who is paying the bills at the ISP? The copyright holders or the guys using the bandwidth? And will the copyright holders offer to make up the shortfall after the ISP ditches all it's best customers?

Re:Good luck with that

[Ethanol-fueled]

And will the copyright holders offer to make up the shortfall after the ISP ditches all it's best customers?

"Best Customers" being Grandmas who pay fifty American dollars a month just to check e-mail.

Re:Good luck with that

[westlake]

And will the copyright holders offer to make up the shortfall after the ISP ditches all it's best customers?

The ISP's best customers are those who make the least demands on the service. The customers who are paying for media content provided by the ISP or its owners and partners.

Not those whose P2P traffic maxes out the bandwidth available over their shared Internet connection - for which they are paying the mass market price.

Re:Good luck with that

[Opportunist]

The best customer is my dad. He uses about 10MB a month to check his email and maybe, once in a blue moon, open a webpage. And if for some reason the 'net breaks down, he shrugs and tries again tomorrow. That's the best customer an ISP could wish for.

The high bandwidth using filesharer that goes ballistic on their support line agents when the net breaks for 5 minutes is about the worst customer they could imagine.

Re:Good luck with that

[timmarhy]

demand for P2P is a huge driver for bringing customers onboard though. since you've been able to pirate music and movies demand for internet services has soared. i'd argue that downloading content is an ISP's best friend.

people that just do a bit of web surfing and email checking are always the ones on the scabby $24.95/mo plans that hardly make the ISP anything, it's the medium downloaders who get a few gigs off limewire and are on the $79 plan that makes isp's cash - typically the have more quota then they need just incase. these are the demographic that make up most of their customers. sure there's always a small subset that will download 100 gigs a month, but they are in the minority.

Re:Good luck with that

[rubies]

Exactly. Plus the tech user / big downloader never rings the help line, while gramma is on there every second day. For an ISP, the best customers are the ones you never have to help.

Re:Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

For customers who transfer the least data to be seen as the best customers (most profitable), it must be a sign that the data backbone costs are too high.

If the data transfer costs were low (or reasonable!), then that barely used connection in the exchange to Grandma's house would be seen as a wastefully used resource, and hence she would be seen as an unprofitable customer.

Here in the UK, BT's still ongoing strangle hold means virtually everyone is stuck with comms where BT is a gatekeeper at some point. BT sell connectivity in chunks of bandwidth, but as time proceeds at a rather predictable rate, effectively BT bill by the byte.

Re:Good luck with that

[laederkeps]

$24.95/month is "cheap"? It only gets you a "scabby" connection plan? 100 gigs/month is a lot?
You guys really need to get some new ISPs. Go check if Finland, South Korea or Hong Kong feels like exporting some to you!

Easily

[Anonymous Coward]

How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?

They won't.

Guilt by association nails it on the head. I have friends who have been flagged by their ISPs because they downloaded large files with vaguely copyright infringing names like "warcraft collection" (a bunch of World of Warcraft add-ons) and "final doom" (a huge 3D digital scene depicting a random battle with one side on the verge of being totally wiped out)

lol

[Charliemopps]

I actually work copyright complaints for an ISP and have an intimate understanding of how this all works. If someone REALLY wanted to highlight the flaws in this process the simple solution would be to get IP addresses of influential members of the government and/or the ISPs and start sending bogus emails to the copyright/abuse/legal mailboxes of the ISP. They'd start cutting off service automatically to all the right people. The uproar would be both hilarious and effective. Trust me, it would work very quickly as the ISP has absolutely no way of verifying the emails. Get the internet cut off to most government buildings and they might start to rethink this policy.

Re:lol

[KahabutDieDrake]

So... What is the dead drop you are sending the IP to address DB table to?

Re:lol

[Charliemopps]

ha! You obviously don't get how broadband works. If only there were such a thing. What I'd recommend is not going after their residential accounts, it would be to go after their work accounts. They are probably public ranges. Ping them, see if you get a response, if you do, send a letter. It's not fool proof, they might not be returning ping requests for example, but if you start thinking along those lines you could probably come up with something. At the very least you could bury their employees in emails. If they start getting several thousand emails a day, I doubt they could keep up.

Re:lol

[clarkkent09]

As far as I know to send a copyright abuse notice you need to provide your full name, address etc and the details of the copyrighted work and some evidence. You can't just anonymously send an email and that's it. I guess you could fake all that but it would be a bit more elaborate than you make it sound

Re:lol

[Ash-Fox]

ha! You obviously don't get how broadband works.

They are probably public ranges. Ping them, see if you get a response, if you do, send a letter.

*face palm*

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just send out a policy question email to your local government officials that requires a human response. And then use the message headers from any received emails to determine what time and what IP addresses they were attached to. From there, you track back the IP address range to the appropriate ISP (same DB as used by the music industry).

BAM! BAM! BAM! The government offices are locked out of the internet.

Any poor councillor that does some after hours emailing from their home account...BAM! BAM! BAM!

Re:lol

[iJusten]

Few years back, when cutting pirates from the 'net became legal in Finland, one of the first cuts were against the autonomical government of Åland. The newspapers questioned widely if the next target would be hospitals. And that was the last I've heard of THAT business in Finland.

We can hope something similar happens at Eire.

Re:lol

[pipedwho]

Filling plausible data into a boilerplate email is the easy part. If the ISP was logging all inbound and outbound port connections, then you'd have a harder time, because you'd need to match the ISP's logs with your data.

Keep in mind that email headers contain a lot of information regarding the IP address, the time that the user was online sending their email, the ISP domain information, etc. It's not much of a step to send out a fake notice with details that were completely plausible.

A diligent ISP would then confirm these 'takedown' notices with the complainant and verify their validity before disconnecting the user. But, we know how likely that is.

Re:lol

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Get the internet cut off to most government buildings and they might start to rethink this policy.

Are you seriously implying the ISPs don't know which IP addresses belong to government contracts?

Also, maybe they don't know the home IP addresses of MPs and government officials, but I sure bet they know the IP addresses of their own executives.

Re:lol

[KahabutDieDrake]

I've actually used DMCA notices against a user on Photobucket. I got a blank DMCA notice form, filled it in accurately, and claimed copywrite on an image that this user had posted. They never even questioned it. They black holed the image on the first one. They black holed the account on when he reposted, and I re-submitted. The guy gave up.

Point of the story, most of these companies aren't going to question ANYTHING on an even remotely legit looking DMCA notice. The relevant equivalent in any given country is likely to be treated more or less the same. The company doesn't want the responsibility for "checking" these notices out. So they don't even try.

Re:lol

[UnderCoverPenguin]

It's likely very easy to find names of people working for the record/movie companies. And, unless the company has implemented some kind of sender authentication that the ISP accepts, it's likely easy to fake the origin of the email.

Re:lol

[Joce640k]

Spammers don't seem to have too much trouble faking all that email info...

Re:lol

[hAckz0r]

Just wait until some pissed off down-loader hacks an application which takes a Government representatives email address and requests that their own IP's be taken down. I predict a simple point-n-click (input email address, ping/traceroute the @*.gov.ie for IP address(s), then forge email to report them) is bound to happen within three months time of this programs implementation/enforcement. It won't be me, but it will be fun to watch how this misdirected law gets repealed once the Government officers learn how the Internet actually works.

Re:lol

[Charliemopps]

All you need is a copy of one of the form letters. Change the IP address on the letter. Done. You have to remember these complaints take up huge amounts of resources for the ISP and are not profitable at all. Even if they only have 1 employee on staff working them, think about how much that 1 employee costs them and they are generating no revenue at all. If you made it so they had to have 5 people working on this alone? 10 people? The more bogus complaints they get the more customers will start calling in saying WTF? So they'd need people to take those calls. Trust me, things would change rather quickly.

Re:lol

[westlake]

The uproar would be both hilarious and effective. Trust me, it would work very quickly as the ISP has absolutely no way of verifying the emails

It would be more than inconvenient for the senders if the e-mails were traced back to their sources. In the states, I would predict conviction on multiple federal felony charges.

Re:lol

[Endo13]

It would be more than inconvenient for the senders if the e-mails were traced back to their sources.

If the source could be linked to the actual sender, he would deserve whatever punishment he got. Something tells me though, that won't be the case.

Re:lol

[Charliemopps]

Exactly. I think that if there was a way to check maybe they would... but there is no way. Anyone on earth can claim copyright on something and there's no way to prove it that doesn't require a team of lawyers.

Re:lol

[Charliemopps]

Logging all inbound and outbound port connections for even a tiny ISP would be completely insane. The amount of data collected in just a few ours would be unbelievably huge. They'd need racks upon racks of servers just to store all the data. Now, monitoring port connections on customers they suspect of abusing their service would be different. But the idea that they could store their entire customer bases connections logs is just plain crazy.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a blank DMCA notice form, filled it in accurately, and claimed copywrite on an image that this user had posted. They never even questioned it.

They didn't even ask WTF "copywrite" is, you fuckass?

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

At the very least you could bury their employees in emails. If they start getting several thousand emails a day, I doubt they could keep up.

They would simply filter them out.

What is it that you expect to gain by mailbombing abuse contacts of government networks?

You can take away my internet

[Anonymous Coward]

But you'll never get me lucky charms.

Actually many other countries have three-strikes

[qirtaiba]

If only it were true that this makes Ireland "the first in the world". In fact there are already three-strikes laws in France, South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, and (though not yet fully implemented) the United Kingdom. In a sense Ireland doesn't even rate a mention against these countries, because its "three strikes" system is not law, but just the policy of a single (admittedly large) ISP.

France's law is the first and most draconian. In its original form, which did not require a court judgment before the user was disconnected it failed a constitutional challenge, but it has since been re-introduced and remains on the books.

A favourite quote of mine comes from the judgment of an Australian Federal Court judge in a case decided earlier this year, in which he said:

One need only consider the lengthy, complex and necessary deliberations of the Court upon the question of primary infringement to appreciate that the nature of copyright infringements within the BitTorrent system, and the concept of “repeat infringer”, are not self-evident. It is highly problematic to conclude that such issues ought to be decided by a party, such as the [ISP], rather than a court. Copyright infringement is not a simple issue.

Re:DMCA Challenge:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, both those positions are consistently anti-corporate.

Trolling Potential

[consumer_whore]

DMCA takedown notices are constantly abused through youtube. Anyone think trolls will be in full effect with this?

Chance for abuse?

[damnfuct]

So someone else can give you enough strikes so you lose your service for a year? Depending on how they implement tracking of who downloads what, there is some huge opportunity for abuse in a targeted user attack; like a DoS on steroids.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[mikaere]

There is no three-strikes law in effect Aotearoa New Zealand. We had one, but a public campaign against it caused the government to suspend its implementation in 2009. It was very similar to the one in Ireland i.e. guilt by accusation. At present it looks like we will get one where some kind of onus of proof will be required, and an independent body will oversee the accusations. So,yeah, it will be a 3 strikes, but a more workable version without the guilt by accusation.

All content is copyrighted

[amiga3D]

Even free stuff is usually under some sort of copyright. Of course to people like the RIAA and MPAA there is no such thing as free content. I expect if you are using bit torrent then you are automatically considered guilty.

Re:All content is copyrighted

[Luther Blisset]

Just in case you weren't being ironic (that doesn't usually get through very well on the Interwebs): Copyrighted != illegal to download

Re:All content is copyrighted

[amiga3D]

There is all kind of free software that is copyrighted but free and legal to download. There are many works of music that are copyrighted but free and legal to download. Copyright means you own the rights to a work.

Re:All content is copyrighted

[Luther Blisset]

There is all kind of free software that is copyrighted but free and legal to download. There are many works of music that are copyrighted but free and legal to download. Copyright means you own the rights to a work.

I know that. I was referring to the last sentence of your previous post, providing a reason why it's impossible to be considered guilty merely for using bit torrent: because there are legal uses of it.

Not to troll...

[Anachragnome]

"How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"

In all sincerity, did you ask them?

I'd start here.

http://eircomconnect.eircom.net/Forum/default.aspx

Re:Not to troll...

[Darkness404]

* Boards: 8 * Threads: 161 * Posts: 2542

Doesn't seem like an active forum at all.

Not to mention most corporate forums enjoy closing down and pretending anything negative they do doesn't exist or you get the helpful employee who is powerless to do anything due to the internal bureaucracy.

Plus, "large ISP" usually means they have some sort of monopoly and screw customers at will (like Comcast in the US)

Re:Not to troll...

[legio_noctis]

And aside from that there is some major JS abuse going on here: all the links have hrefs along the lines of javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$MainContent$Threads$ThreadsRepeater$ctl00$LinkButton1','').

I wonder if they ever stopped to think what on earth the URI was invented for. To me this makes their technical incompetence quite clear.

Other ISPs would protest...

[Sepiraph]

I think other ISPs who doesn't support the action of this ISP should stop peering with this ISP to show that this type of behavior is not acceptable.

Re:Other ISPs would protest...

[UnderCoverPenguin]

As another poster pointed out, eircom owns the "last mile" copper that other ISPs depend on to deliver service to subscribers, so they would not be in a position to de-peer from eircom. Indeed, eircom may be in a position to force the other ISPs to follow its policy.

"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[Kargan]

I work for a tech support firm in the US, supporting a number of different ISPs, and at least a handful of them actively enforce a "three strikes" rule, once they are notified by media watchdog companies that a certain IP address that's assigned to them is guilty of copyright infringement. It goes first strike - cut off service till you contact the main office and sign a document to indicate that you've removed the copyrighted material from your pc. Second strike - same deal, except you lose your service for 3-7 days. Third strike, they cancel your service permanently. I'm kinda surprised this story is making /.

Re:"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[techno-vampire]

One question: how many times has each of them been sued by somebody who was falsely accused by a self-proclaimed "media watchdog" company?

Re:"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[Kargan]

As far as I'm aware, zero.

I've even talked to end-users myself who had no knowledge of file-sharing (i.e., they were elderly), and the telco treated them no differently.

The user did, however, have an unsecured wireless router in place. I helped them secure it.

Re:"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a tech support firm in the US, supporting a number of different ISPs, and at least a handful of them actively enforce a "three strikes" rule, once they are notified by media watchdog companies that a certain IP address that's assigned to them is guilty of copyright infringement.

It goes first strike - cut off service till you contact the main office and sign a document to indicate that you've removed the copyrighted material from your pc. Second strike - same deal, except you lose your service for 3-7 days. Third strike, they cancel your service permanently.

I'm kinda surprised this story is making /.

I'm going to have to call bullshit.

I work for a tech support firm in the US also, and outside of University's have no clue what your talking about.
I manage or have subscribed to connections for Quest, Verizon, AT&T, Cogent, Level-3, Comcast, Grande, TW-telecom, Time Warner Cable and honestly have never seen anyone but Grande ever do anything but forward a MPAA letter on.

Please tell what ISP is doing this?

Re:"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[pipedwho]

Actually, it goes more like this:

1st strike, they cut of your service until you contact the main office.

2nd strike - there is no second strike, as you didn't bother contacting their office after the first strike. Of course, now you are connecting to the internet via a competing ISP that doesn't take random infringement notices as irrefutable evidence.

Re:"Three strikes" rules -- unusual?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. I work a shitty Tier 1 tech support job for Verizon, and while I do see copyright infringements on peoples' accounts from time to time, with some downloaders having several, I've never seen or heard of VZ cutting anyone off for filesharing.

The only time people even know VZ is tracking their torrents is when I tell them.

fuck eircom, use mobile pay as you go broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

I use meteor pay as you go usb mobile broadband here in ireland. I just walked into a shop handed over cash , got my usb stick and started downloading pirated movies. Meteor don't know and didn't want to know my home address or who i am, so i'll never end up in court. if Meteor ever cut me off, i'll just walk into another shop the next day and start the process over. Every month i go into a Meteor shop, give them 20 euros cash, they give me a code which i enter into the dialup software and i'm good to go for another month.

Prosecution

[pcfixup4ua]

Why hasn't some state\country decided to just go ahead and prosecute all down-loaders. It would be a great gesture to the IP Industries, and you might get Movie\Recording Studios, and Software companies to re-locate to your state\country.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "Aotearoa" mean?

Really easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

As many customers as possible, should turn on file sharing, let the ISP loose thousands of the PAYING customers.
This will set straight priorities very fast, it will demonstrates who are the real masters of the ISP business.
Unless the industry requesting the policing is willing to compensate the ISP for the lost business. Which would not happen.

Re:DMCA Challenge:

[clarkkent09]

Anti any corporation? How about Geeknet Incorporated that owns slashdot? By the way, it is naive to see the world as government v. corporations. Corporations wouldn't have the power they have if it wasn't for the government. It is the government that gives them their (IMHO) excessive legal protection and it is the government that allows itself to be manipulated by the corporate money which has enormous impact on most legislation. I don't have a problem with a corporation that obtains its profits honestly by providing good products or whatever it is that it does. I do have a problem with corporations that profit from government favors. I think the semi-legitimate anger as exists among many /. posters is quite naively directed solely towards the corporations and what they mistakenly see as a failure of the fee market (which we don't have) rather than the way I see it which is government corruption.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[shermo]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aotearoa

What about corporations?

[karl.auerbach]

Suppose a corporation - let's call it "Google" - makes more than 3 improper copies. Would it lose its access to the internet in Ireland?

Re:What about corporations?

[phantomfive]

Google has paid more out in copyright settlements than you will ever earn in your entire life. You can't really hit them with this because they don't really have an ISP, they have their own peering agreements, but don't worry, corporations have trouble with copyright too. And if it's a company with money, the RIAA will be sure to swoop in and sue. They favor whichever method they perceive will give them the most money.

Re:What about corporations?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Because corporations like Google don't use an ADSL line with a 'home user' type contract. Corporations pay more, and gets different service.

Re:What about corporations?

[currently_awake]

No. There are two sets of rules: those for -people- and those for companies. Clearly you are ignorant of the difference, but these three strikes laws only apply to people. For instance, if your boat dumps half a tank of diesel fuel into the ocean you get charged, if Exon dumps a tanker full, it's just business.

Fuck 'em.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what? Fuck it. Just turn the fucking internet off already. What the fuck does anyone think broadband customers are doing with broadband access?
Checking their email? Instant message? Go to stupid static websites? You ca use 56K dial-up for that shit. Fuck no. Its to download media. Period.

Once the old guys that run old media finaly die-off, en masse, this will get better. Old people just don't get it. So they sue everybody. Fuck them with beans

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This will get borked in implementation

[sumdumass]

This will probably get broken in implementation so bad that public outcry will cause the legislature to regulate the practice.

I had Verizon turn my service off once. I called complaining that it wasn't working and they sent me to a website describing complaints of illegally sharing movies. (yea, no internet access and they send me to a web site). I checked it on my laptop at another location then I pointed out that all three complaints were within 5 seconds of each other, the IP address listed was not the IP they assigned to me, and after about 20 minutes on hold, they turned the service back on. I didn't even get a "my bad, our mistake" or anything from them.

About two days later, I started receiving phone calls saying that my service was scheduled to be shut off because of copyright infringement. This time I checked the website and another 3 complaints were logged within 10 seconds of each other. They got the IP right this time though. The copyright violation was Mandriva spring ed. Supposedly there is some movie or something out there that looks similar enough to a linux distribution that they thought it was it. I have yet to find it though.

After another 20 minutes of arguing with them, they told me to ignore it. I mentioned something about suing them for harassment. 6 months later my service stopped working again, I stopped paying them.

I don't think it will be much different in Ireland. Especially if third parties are involved and they do the same shit, file 3 complaints within seconds of each other in order to get to the max and shut the service off.

solution...

[sxpert]

Start your own ISP and tell those morons to go to hell !

Re:solution...

[cpghost]

As an ISP, you have upstream providers (if you're small), and peers (if you're big). Both can disconnect you for whatever reason if they feel like it.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes the OP was too busy downloading TOTALLY FREE 100% LEGAL LINUX DISTROS 24/7 to notice there's some kind of war on piracy going on and now is apparently shocked to discover his TOTALLY FREE 100% LEGAL LINUX DISTROS he downloads "all the time" won't cause him any trouble.

Sorry for my skepticism but every time anything gets mentioned about any kind of new strategy for dealing with pirates there's always that guy who uses a bazillion GBs a second downloading nothing but legal files. The OP apparently missed a few years of news regarding similar occurrences elsewhere but now that it's his ISP doing it he's shocked. Show me a man that never lies and I'll show you a liar, or something like that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get back to sorting my 6 TB collection of legal stuff.

3 strikes per person?

[mxh83]

I wonder if it is 3 strikes per person for per household? It would be logical to then put the internet in like a babys name... they'll still be stupid for quite a few years but which time the law would not be enforcable

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[pipedwho]

Since it's in the place where you'd expect a progressive verb to be, it could mean something along the lines of 'screwing' or 'bastardising'.

Either that, or you could go with what Wikipedia has to say: "...the most widely known and accepted Maori name for New Zealand."

Great economic experiment

[martijnd]

I expect high street music prices in Dublin to rise with several Euro over the next few months as the music companies try out how much extra income they can generate from the Irish public to be able to figure out if their campaign to charge every penny out of the Europeans will ultimately pay off. For the music companies Irerland will become an experimental area to see how much of a surcharge they can get away with.

I also fully expect the Irish to take advantage of cheap & fast eSATA portable hard drives to just share all popular music ever published by sneaker net. Instead of sharing simple songs, or albums Irish teenagers will be sharing collections of hundreds of albums. Thus completely removing the need to download any music on demand & the potential revenue of advertising forever.

Customers will find compeditors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Legal challenges will abound.

Label searches don't identify content. Someone will label their song similarly to another song, they will not take it down, and the ISP will be sued and will lose for breach of contract.

Additionally, each user they disconnect for a year reduces their revenue. Any attempt to reverse this only motivates them to disconnect users by making the users pay for it; this will anger them.

Identifying public content at a bit and byte level is time consuming.

It also doesn't find or brake WASTE networks, as an example.

It does not bypass IP-level bans of search infrastructure used by the goons such as peerblock.

An IP and port# doesn't identify a MAC, and a MAC doesn't necessarily identify the hardware, and the hardware doesn't necessarily identify the user.

Finally, even if you do catch them, they can set up round-robin wikileaks style and then the infrastructure of the country has to shift to catch it.

The costs do not equate to greater rewards, because of that this will fail.

Re:Customers will find compeditors.

[internewt]

An IP and port# doesn't identify a MAC, and a MAC doesn't necessarily identify the hardware, and the hardware doesn't necessarily identify the user.

Save a copy of http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt, use the following command to change your MAC to a valid, but fake, address. This doesn't work with all network drivers out there..... my Atheros wifi card doesn't work if I try to change the MAC, but an RALink based USB wifi dongle does.

ifconfig eth0 down hw ether `cat oui.txt | grep \(base\ 16\) | sed 's/\(..\)/:\1/g' | cut -b2-9 | shuf | tail -1``dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 bs=$RANDOM 2> /dev/null | md5sum | sed 's/\(..\)/:\1/g' | cut -b1-9`

Shouldn't it read....

[falconcy]

Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule on behalf of Copyright Abusers?

Re:Shouldn't it read....

[Anonymous Coward]

probably.... Journalism's never really been my thing. Must try harder! That and I submitted this quite late last night but that's just excuses.

the issue is, how proven

[Budenny]

We appear to have, as always in these matters, sanction on accusation. The subject is accused three times of having broken a law. The fourth time he is found to have done this (not by a court, but by a supplier of goods and services) his Internet connection is cut off for a week. Another time, and he is disconnected for a year.

At no point in this process do the courts intervene, and you will notice that the penalty is different from normal criminal sanctions, in that it is not either fine, community service, or imprisonment. There are some exceptions, some kinds of driving offences are punishable by withdrawal of permission to drive. But its rather rare, and the characteristic appears to be where there is a danger to the public, and where the sanction is directly related to the offense. We do not, for instance, ban someone from driving because he engaged in false accounting, or because he breached copyright. He drove while intoxicated, and we banned him from driving.

The problem with the disconnection penalty, apart from the fact that it is punishment on accusation, is that it is not an appropriate punishment for the crime. I have no truck with copyright breaches. They should be prosecuted before a court, and on conviction there should be punishments of the usual sorts, fines, community service, perhaps even jail terms in serious cases. But it makes no more sense to disconnect someone's house from the Internet than it does to ban him from driving in a case of false accounting. Or to ban him from shopping for food, because he has sold counterfeit goods in the local street market. Or to disconnect his phone. Or ban him from visiting public libraries, or using the bus service.

We need two things to deal with this matter in a way that has regard to civil liberties. One is that all punishment shall occur only when an offense is proven in court, and shall only be imposed by a court, not by a service provider. The second is that the punishment shall make sense in the scale of other offenses. Neither is true of the 'three strikes' proposals. The fact is, this breach of the law is no different from any other breach, and needs to be handled in exactly the same way as all others.

Re:the issue is, how proven

[ledow]

If you agree to those terms and conditions (including the three-strikes, the punishment, the venue, the measuring device, the appeal routine, etc.), then you're stuffed until there is a universal service obligation to provide Internet to every individual. It's just a standard contract, in the same way that if you are found posting libellous material about a third-party onto a company's message boards, they can ban you from that message board. Even if it's just an accusation. You agreed to the terms and conditions, or not.

The sanction, in this case, is a result of your breach of contract. The *user* is actually at fault, even if not explicitly stated, because almost all Internet connection T&C's include a line about not using the connection to perform illegal acts. Nowhere in your T&C's does it state whether that has to be proven in a court of law, or whether they can just act on their own suspicions. The exact details of that could well go to court if you think you've been cut off unfairly, and it would be messy, but it would be a breach of contract from the ISP if they were unable to prove you were doing something that the contract said you shouldn't. They, however, have absolutely no requirement (at the moment) to set you back up with an Internet connection if you were right. They may compensate you for the breach of contract, but that's the end of the matter - you may even be blacklisted from using any of their subsidiaries ever again.

However, it might well *eventually* be classed as an unfair contract term. That's unlikely and probably DECADES away from happening because such things are purely interpretation of law and in those particular areas 99% of that interpretation is what the court *thinks* should be in the contract, not any case law or similar. So, it's not "illegal", it's not "bypassing the legal system", it's you agreeing to stupid contract terms without reading the small print. If you can't find an ISP that doesn't have those contract terms, nobody (at the moment) is obliged to provide you with such an ISP. Internet access is still an optional, contract-driven luxury service. If it becomes a "right" then an awful lot of things will be brought in with it to control it (and hence is reason enough not to make it a "right").

I may not agree with Microsoft being able to basically worm its way out of responsibility in its EULA's but I have choices - challenge those T&C's in a court of law if I feel they are "unfair" or not agree to them at all. Same with ISP's. Nobody is (currently) making you go with an ISP that can throw you off the Internet at even a slight accusation. You may not have ANY choice of ISP at all - some people still can't get broadband whatsoever. But at the moment, you're not *entitled* to it, and if you ever are you will almost certainly have a set-in-stone group of laws to ensure you still can't pirate stuff (and can still get filtered / thrown off if you don't follow that).

Accusations have always been able to get you disconnected / investigated from even offline activities... you can be banned from working in a school because of a completely unfounded, retracted, historical accusation from a known liar. It's not *illegal* to do so, if the employer wants to use that as their justification. It may be unfair, but it's unlikely to be seen as such in a court of law. You can be removed from a club because the security heard a rumour that you started a fight in a club down the road. You can be thrown out of a shop because one of the assistants thinks they saw you damage something in there. This is not "new" law. It's just people failing to account for their actions and their contract-prescribed results when they sign up to a contract. Don't like it? Don't sign the contract. Can't find a contract for an ISP that you want to sign? Tough. I can't find a contract for a car hire company that will let me race the cars on a rally track, or will insure me if I don't have a license, or will let me use the car as a taxi. Same thing.

Re:the issue is, how proven

[NeutronCowboy]

One is that all punishment shall occur only when an offense is proven in court, and shall only be imposed by a court, not by a service provider.

And I'd like a pony, too. You know why this is never going to happen? Because it will be too expensive for corporations to track copyright infringement this way. Instead, what will happen is that media companies will pool their money, spend about $10M-$20M on lobbying for their law and a few attention grabbing lawsuits, and save $10M each every year that the new law is effect. Technically, this could probably be counter-balanced by citizens getting together and spending more money on lobbying and campaign donations than the corps, but that is so unlikely that we might as well just go back to sending data via smoke signals.

Eircom the dinosaur

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that Eircom Employee's Union (ESOT) were asking the government for a bail out just a few weeks ago as the new owners have said they are going to restructure the company to deal with its network that is falling apart and massive drop in marketshare over the past few years to about 40% of the Irish BB market as they charge one of the highest line rentals in the world at over 25 Eur before you even get a service, that is just to "rent" the line.

No wonder their competitors are killing them. Everything they do is a fuck you to the consumer, only so long you can get away with that before the market bites you in the ass. The only people left on Eircom are people like my parents that have a choice of Eircom or Satellite Broadband. They are with an eircom reseller though so only have to pay eircom the line rental.

Enforcement pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Being Irish I feel dirty, however our track record of actually enforcing laws is worse than the speed at which Eircom were happy to play bitch to the record industry. So time will tell if it actually gets used and is usable.

Re:Enforcement pending

[Squeeonline]

If one ISP stands up and refuses to give up records etc, and people rally behind them, that company would hopefully flourish. However I don't think there are enough people in Ireland that care enough to do this. We have bigger issues on our minds. At the very least, one should be able to rally the student population and others who care about personal right and free stuff downloaded from the internet!

Re:Enforcement pending

[kaini]

If one ISP stands up and refuses to give up records etc, and people rally behind them, that company would hopefully flourish.

This has already happened. UPC/NTL have told IRMA (the Irish RIAA) to basically go and fuck themselves unless they have a court order.

Good: we need the pain

[Aceticon]

I'm starting to think that the only way to get rid of this kind of law is for as many people to suffer as much as possible.

Really, the "Common Joe/Jane" won't be aware of this and it's implications until he/she loses his/her Internet connection 'cause the neighbours kid hacked into their WiFi and used it to download music.

My hope is that, once enough people loose their connections like this, there will be a backslash against this kind of laws (potentially, even against the whole Media Industry).

There are plenty of ways by which this kind of laws will be self destructive:
- As more and more people become aware of these actions (either because they're directly affected or because they know someone that is), they will tend to migrate to ISPs that "don't do this to people". Smart, small ISPs can use this to gain market share from the incumbents. Eventually even the incumbents will start becoming slow and obstructionist with regards to requests to cut people's connections ...
- Plenty of governments are passing "Right to a broadband connection" laws. There is a growing awareness that the Internet has become essential for the prosperity and competitiveness of developed nations. At the same time, Government has been putting more and more services on the Net. This will intensify as the need for the state to cut custs means that many services are moved to the Net.In this scenario, cutting people's Internet connections en masse is bad for countries' futures and bad for governments' bottom-lines.
- There is no country in the world where the Media Industry produces enough wealth to overset the losses in productivity and efficiency of not having large segments that country's population connected. On the balance, these kind of measures make a country less competitive, not more - countries with smaller Media Industries will be the first to break ranks (or not get into it at all), thus boosting their own competivity.

Don't forget that teenagers and kids are the ones that do the most sharing online: there are a lot of families with kids out there - if this is really applied there will soon enough be lots of stories in the press.

The way I see it, we as Internet savy and technology aware people should help this allong by providing the "neighbours" kid with easy to use tools to hack into those WiFi connections and make it easy for anybody to denounce anybody else for Copyright Theft (incorrect word used on purpose) and have their connections closed. In fact, the ideal scenario is whole neighbourhoods going down because of some kid or the local misadjusted teenager accusing half his neighbours of Copyright Theft.

Only when these kinds of laws are taken to their natural conclusion (in a world where everything is copyrighted) will they be repelled - maybe we might even leverage the backslash to cleanup Intellectual Property legislation ...

Re:Good: we need the pain

[Squeeonline]

Mod parent up. One must also consider that as the current internet savvy demographic ages, and a younger one follows, more of the population will care about their privacy and rights. You can already see that happening with privacy issues on facebook. It wont be long before people complain about record companies tracking and giving information to ISPs or however it will work.

Making yourself a target...

[elewton]

Imagining that one had network access at an IP for which one is not responsible, but is provided by Eircom, what would be the best way (preferably without installing anything), to make oneself a target?

Is there an http based copyyright violation service that would be habitually monitored by ICLA or whatever?

Didnt Eu Parl. banned any kind of such measure ?

[unity100]

what will happen to ireland now ?

To the moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

"-1 disagree and feel emotional about the subject" is not in any way equivalent to "-1 troll".
If you wish to mod as offtopic, that would be appropriate. However, that would necessitate the GP be modded offtopic as well. To mod the OP as off-topic when he is replying to the point raised by GP, who is at +5, is hypocritical.

I spent two years forwarding DMCA notices to IT

[dejanc]

I used to work at an American university where we received a huge amount of notices from MPAA, Sony & friends. This was some 7 years ago and affected students living in dorms and using the university ISP.

We implemented the three strikes rule, but we ourselves were well aware of the flaws:

• Notices were NEVER checked for authenticity. They arrived by email and we had no check on the headers. We processed them so routinely that even if they came from completely bogus addresses - we'd never know.
• We trusted the notices. When we received a list of material infringed upon by an IP - we took it for granted that the list was correct.
• People who got cought red handed (with infringing material on their hard disks) didn't need to be sharpest to say that their computers got compromised by a malicious virus. Nowadays, pretty much everybody has a wireless router - they just need to claim it was unsecured and somebody stole their bandwidth.

We should really start rethinking how we think about copyright. At least in the country I'm in now, you cannot commit a crime without an intent. What stops everyone from claiming ignorance on how computers work and what happens when you run a P2P program? On the other hand, what stops corporations from claiming infringement on an IP? What sort of evidence can you provide that somebody transmitted pieces of your work online and how can you prove that you didn't alter the evidence to your cause?

IF YOU GET THREE WARNINGS, THAT'S FOUR STRIKES AND

[Anonymous Coward]

OUT!! Two warnings, then you are out on the third. Stupid lady, can't even scrore baseball !!

and the answer is....

[lindoran]

they wont most likely they will use something like a DMCA Notice and then sort out the details later....

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Tim C]

and (though not yet fully implemented) the United Kingdom

There is also a good chance that the new coalition government will look at stopping ours in its tracks, though that's by no means certain.

Re:Didnt Eu Parl. banned any kind of such measure

[Luther Blisset]

Banned? No, they didn't. What they did was simply not making it mandatory (i.e. not a EU-level law), but members of the EU can still have such measures in their national laws.

Not "fair use"

[Theaetetus]

Huh? You can still record from TV? :)

Seriously. No, you're not pirating. The station paid for the right to broadcast that song, and part of the fair use deal is (ok, was) that it's accepted that people will possibly record this broadcast for their personal use.

That's not how fair use works, nor are you allowed to record from the radio "for your personal use".
Fair use is a bit frustrating. The name is so simple that most people get suckered into believing that that's all it is "use that's fair". Even scholars get confused - Professor Neeson at Harvard tried to raise a fair use defense in the Tenenbaum trial, and his argument amounted to "but it's not faiiiiiir!"

Fair use is codified at 17 USC 107. It reads:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

So, take your radio-recording situation. Is it for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, or scholarship? Obviously not. What about that last one, research? "I'm just researching whether this band is worth buying!" No, that argument has been tried and failed repeatedly. Research in the statute means scientific research, not aesthetic research or research into the economic value of something to you personally. There is no statutory "try before you buy".
What about the other factors in the test, though? The statute does say "such as criticism, comment, etc." so it's not an exhaustive list. But this is easy too:
1) You're using the work for personal enjoyment. It's non-profit in the sense that you aren't profiting, but it's not for educational use. Rather, it's to avoid having to pay for a copy.
2) The nature of the work is a commercial, copyrighted song, rather than a list of formulas from a textbook or a collection of data records.
3) You're using the entire song, not just a clip.
4) You could have purchased the song, and did not.

Nonetheless, it's not pirating, providing you're using the recording for the purposes of time-shifting. As the Supreme Court explained in the Betamax case, time-shifting creates no harm, and thus the copyright owner has to demonstrate the likelihood of harm. If, however, you're building a library of music by recording it off the radio, you're no longer simply time-shifting. The distinction revolves around your statement "recording off the radio for personal use" - with only that limitation, the statement is not correct.

Re:Didnt Eu Parl. banned any kind of such measure

[Anonymous Coward]

It will sink.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Luther Blisset]

In France? Last I heard about that was the French Supreme Court ruling that such measures were against the French Constitution, so you might want to double-check that.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Grumbleduke]

and (though not yet fully implemented) the United Kingdom

There is also a good chance that the new coalition government will look at stopping ours in its tracks, though that's by no means certain.

The current thought is that they'll only stop the web-blocking/censorship parts; and they won't actually stop it, they just won't implement it properly for now. As soon as the Lib Dems have been caught up (i.e. paid enough by the media corps) then that will likely be implemented as well.

The rest of the copyright-related parts are going ahead as planned with Ofcom working on the code of practice (or rather, asking the BPI nicely to do it all for them) and there is an open government consultation (closing tomorrow - 25/5) on the allocation of costs. The DEA is going to be pushed through whatever happens but it will take a few more months as it needs to be approved by Europe first.

Remember, the Tory front-bench voted for the Digital Economy Act, not against it.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Mornedhel]

That's why he says that it "failed a constitutional challenge".

The Conseil constitutionnel ruled that the HADOPI law in its first form was anticonstitutional in that only a judge, after a trial, could restrict freedom of speech.

Then the law was modified so that the HADOPI authority would need to send its data to a judge for an accelerated procedure (as with traffic violations).

The Conseil Constitutionnel ruled that the new version of the HADOPI law was constitutional last December, so you might want to update your sources.

Re:Actually many other countries have three-strike

[Luther Blisset]

That's why he says that it "failed a constitutional challenge".

True. My mistake, it seems I missed that part.

The Conseil constitutionnel ruled that the HADOPI law in its first form was anticonstitutional in that only a judge, after a trial, could restrict freedom of speech.

Then the law was modified so that the HADOPI authority would need to send its data to a judge for an accelerated procedure (as with traffic violations).

The Conseil Constitutionnel ruled that the new version of the HADOPI law was constitutional last December, so you might want to update your sources.

Aye, Sir. Sources updated, since you have provided facts that contradict the information I previously had. Thank you.

What constitutes a "derivative work"?

[CanadianRealist]

"If you rip the audio from a music video, you have not copied the music video. Instead, you have created a derivative work of the video comprising just the soundtrack."

I don't know the legal definition of derivative work, but I would have thought it involved doing some actual work to create something new - not just leaving out part of the original work. If this really is a derivative work, then isn't any mp3 ripped from a CD a derivative work since the mp3 is just a lossy compressed version of the actual song?

Re:What constitutes a "derivative work"?

[Theaetetus]

"If you rip the audio from a music video, you have not copied the music video. Instead, you have created a derivative work of the video comprising just the soundtrack."

I don't know the legal definition of derivative work, but I would have thought it involved doing some actual work to create something new - not just leaving out part of the original work. If this really is a derivative work, then isn't any mp3 ripped from a CD a derivative work since the mp3 is just a lossy compressed version of the actual song?

The statutory definition is in 17 USC 101:

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

They're talking about things like doing a movie version of a play, prints of oil paintings, arranging a Metallica song for an orchestra, etc. Basically, stuff where there may be some creative contribution, but not sufficient to end the copyright owner's property right.

Re:What constitutes a "derivative work"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The statutory definition is in 17 USC 101:

Not in Ireland.

One important difference

[CanadianRealist]

I'm not sure about the answer to your question of whether you pirating the music or not. But a significant difference is that in many places (Canada for example) downloading is not considered to be as bad as uploading. That works great with youtube. But if you're using P2P then you're going to be uploading as well.

DMCA?

[colonelquesadilla]

The DMCA is a US law... contrary to popular belief ireland is not a state of the US. I suspect the ISP is just doing this on their own under the "we can deny service to anyone without reason" principle. Fortunately I wouldn't be affected, as I only pirate pr0n.

The worst three-strikes law

[CanadianRealist]

Though rarely discussed, the worst three-strikes law is in North Korea. Somebody downloaded a few songs once and now the whole country is banned from the internet.

Perfect timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to sign up for a consultancy gig with Eircom when I read this. I have made it clear that I absolutely will not work for them now, and explained my reasons.

In was told that there is a lot of resistance to this among theEircom techies, but management feel that it would be too costly to fight in court.

Thanks Slashdot :-)