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?"
Rather than analyzing the content of user traffic.
Welcome to guilty by association.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They could always kneecap you with a Black and Decker.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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
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.
and while they're at it they should ban people from sidewalks when they make their own copies of florsheims.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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 ?
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.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?
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?
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)
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.
I know. This really gets my ire up.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
No really, the majority of Eircom is owned by Babcock & Brown, which is an Aussie company
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:
No, both those positions are consistently anti-corporate.
DMCA takedown notices are constantly abused through youtube. Anyone think trolls will be in full effect with this?
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
It's good luck to be superstitious
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.
"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
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.
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 /.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
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.
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.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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.
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aotearoa
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Suppose a corporation - let's call it "Google" - makes more than 3 improper copies. Would it lose its access to the internet in Ireland?
The guys who brought us Guinness give us this?
Not the first drunken mistake made...
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Start your own ISP and tell those morons to go to hell !
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
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."
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.
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.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule on behalf of Copyright Abusers?
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.
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 ...
Is there an http based copyyright violation service that would be habitually monitored by ICLA or whatever?
what will happen to ireland now ?
Read radical news here
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:
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 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!
they wont most likely they will use something like a DMCA Notice and then sort out the details later....
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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`
Car analogies break down.
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.
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.
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.
This
No: Windows respects DRM. The OSS world simply ignores those restrictions as soon as they can decode the stuff.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
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.