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?"
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.
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.
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 ?
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/
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:
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
DMCA takedown notices are constantly abused through youtube. Anyone think trolls will be in full effect with this?
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
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.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Oh we'll see about THAT!
No one suspects the Digital Millennium Copyright Act!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.