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

I'm guessing you'll be cut off

[Kitkoan]

Welcome to guilty by association.

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

[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

[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

[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.

 

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?

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 ?

Ass Monkies

[Das Auge]

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

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:BRILLIANT!

[Concerned Onlooker]

I know. This really gets my ire up.

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.

"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: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.