Ireland's Largest ISP Settles With Record Industry 222
An anonymous reader writes "In what has been billed as a world first, four music companies and Irish ISP Eircom have agreed to work together to end illegal music downloading. The Irish branches of the record companies (EMI Records Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd, Universal Music Ltd and Warner Music Ltd.) brought a High Court action against Eircom last March which has resulted in this settlement after eight days of trial. Eircom will be implementing a three-step process — informing a subscriber that their IP address has been detected infringing copyright; warning the subscriber that if they do not stop they will be disconnected; and finally disconnecting the user if they fail to heed the warning. Which technology they will be using to spy on their customers is currently unknown. EMI and the other record companies have recommended US-based Audible Magic, which (among other things) claims to block copyright violating web content from sites like Youtube and MySpace. However, digital surveillance is nothing new in Ireland and Eircom may have already tested and implemented the necessary technologies."
Re:Let' see how fast they will run out of customer (Score:5, Interesting)
Good thing then that their wireless passwords for the routers they give out are easy to crack
http://taint.org/2007/10/01/185837a.html [taint.org]
Re:A comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where I like to point out there are also loads of false positives. Great example is me, over past few months I have gotten 3 letter saying I have downloaded movies on the eDonkey network, even listing the specific movies. Fine except I am the only one in my house who uses eDonkey and I know for a fact that I did not download that content they specified especially since 10 feet form the computer are at least 2 of the 3 dvds for the content specified. now in Canada they really don't do anything else, Rogers just forwards on the e mails and that's about it.
so with all these 3 strikes and you are out crap, I would not not have net access for actually not only not downloading content but for buying the DVD's. There are so many simple ways of avoiding these things of laying blame on others like spoofing ip's and then there are ways around it liek encription and proxies. so really when will they stop this kind of crap and find better ways to deal with the issues, Like servers set up for blanked non DRM subscriptions where I can download all I want for a monthly fee or some other method that would work. And get over the fact no matter what you do downloading content is not going away, you are just making people come up with new solutions to your issues and there are more people trying to get around the issues then make them. O and ya don't forget we still see record sales of dvd's/movies and music is growing online downloading in leaps and bounds so you can't tell me you are not making cash.
SCO is finely dyeing off why cant the RIAA and equivalent news
Re:It's all a red herring (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch how fast https becomes ubiquitous. When everyone is encrypting everything, the RIAA will be utterly powerless.
Wait until people go back to swapping data on disks.
Uploading a music collection onto a 16 Flash drive and downloading it at a friends house doesn't take very long, and transfers many thousands of tracks. I doubt the record industry is ever going to stop that.
It is all moot anyway, as in 20 years time, the people who grew up pirating music will be in Government.
Re:It's all a red herring (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, then watch how fast the ISP becomes the "man in the middle". You'll have to accept their certificate to make any SSL connection.
ISP's are stupid to even consider stuff like monitoring traffic. By doing that they are not longer a utility and are making themselves liable for everything on their network. Of course in big industry they're all buddy-buddy and probably don't really have to worry about it... at least not until a consumer sues them. They could be sued for anything from defamation, cyberbullying/stalking, hate speech, etc.
I've just cancelled my Eircom order (Score:3, Interesting)
One Checkbox (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget Freenet. Most Bittorrent clients have a checkbox in the options somewhere that routes traffic through the Tor Network. This measure is going nowhere.
Re:Let' see how fast they will run out of customer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let' see how fast they will run out of customer (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I'm assuming you were referring to legitimate privacy rights here, not to a non-existent right to download material in breach of copyright.
The right to act in any way which does not cause harm to others is far more substantial than any so-called "privacy right", recent attempts to undermine real rights in favor of exclusive copyright privileges notwithstanding.
Re:Freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:botnet (Score:2, Interesting)