Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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