Music-Swapping Sites To Be Blocked By Irish ISPs 194
An anonymous reader writes "Irish internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping websites, as internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry. Eircom, the country's biggest internet provider, is to start blocking its internet customers from accessing music swapping."
Good Old Racketeering (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, it's the virtual equivalent of paying thugs to block access to a store.
Call the lawyers.
Worse than useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rapidshare? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Rapidshare is blocked, then? And Megaupload? And Mediafire, Sendspace and Badongo? And the hundreds of other free filesharing services that seem to pop up everywhere?
This is completely futile.
IRC? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile in financial news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
That's brave of them (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly, now the ISPs are responsible for any music-swapping that occurs since they've taken it upon themselves to determine what is or isn't legal.
Far worse than useless. (Score:2, Insightful)
I can haz censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Between political correctness on the left, intolerance on the right, and pressure from crony capitalists to wall off their monopoly profits, pretty soon the only thing you'll be able to post on the internet will be cat pictures. :(
Why do the music cartels have so much influence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply in terms of gross earnings, the music companies make peanuts compared to some other very big industries being negatively impacted by all this anti-piracy hullabaloo (sure, corporations probably don't pirate music, but this DRM and filtering and other BS all carry a cost for anyone working online). Are they just that much better at lobbying? Have they somehow nobbled all the right people? What gives?
Confused,
Re:"Music swapping"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this include sites like Magnatune, which offer independent music at much lower prices or even for free? I mean, that's damaging to its business, right?
Re:Good Old Racketeering (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rapidshare? (Score:5, Insightful)
My problem with this is that sharing files is not illegal, nor is sharing music. Sharing copyrighted files without rights to do so probably is in Ireland, but forcing ISPs to block legitimate sites in a broad manner like this because they have the potential to "damage" your business is bullshit. And blocking the Pirate Bay is another brand of bullshit since the only file-sharing going on there is with .torrent files.
Re:Why do the music cartels have so much influence (Score:5, Insightful)
It goes something like this:
Music industry lobby
Lobbyist: Hi Mr MP, how would you like to meet Bono?
MP: OMG HE WAS MY IDOL AS A CHILD I'D LOVE TO
Lobbyist: Okay, just implement these laws otherwise Bono will be a very very sad person and might not want to come out and see you
MP: Sure!
IT industry lobby
Lobbyist: Hi Mr MP, how would you like to meet Richard Stallman?
MP: Who?
More seriously though, I think the issue does seem to be at least from my experience of reading into comments from various British MPs that the music industry is much better connected and MPs are much more likely to bow down at their feet simply because although some people of their generation are the founding fathers of IT as we know it, many more simply missed the boat with the IT thing and MPs nearly always fall into the latter- they just don't get IT, but they ALL know who Bono and so on is and they all worship these types of people. We don't have any IT literate MPs here and I'm not sure it's much different abroad, Obama is one of the first politicians I've seen that actually seems to have a decent grasp of technology.
I think the crux of it is that people in the music industry and politicians seem to get on well, they just seem to have the same mindset whilst IT and Science simply don't seem to get on with politicians as well. In that scenario it doesn't really matter what an industry is worth, most politicians don't seem to take a logical approach to decision making like that. They're more fallable to arguments such as "Piracy is wrong, it's illegal, it always has been, it must be stopped" than they were to reasoned arguments producing statistics showing piracy is only bad for the major labels but probably good overall for the population as a whole. If politicians did follow a logical, reasoned way of thinking then in the UK at least we wouldn't be seeing this consistent push for ID cards despite the population, the opposition parties, ex-security service leaders, employers/businesses being against it and costs for the scheme ballooning into many many billions of pounds- no logical or reasoned thought would lead to the conclusion that continuing such a scheme is a good idea.
One final note is that a few weeks back David Cameron mentioned that if the Conservative party made it into power next that he would appoint someone from the creative industry to be in charge of deciding the UK's broadband future. One has to wonder what on earth the logic behind that is when he could choose someone from the technology industry. That coupled with his speech to the BPI a couple of years ago that was full of ignorance and many other comments and events through the past few years along similar lines are a pretty good demonstration that David Cameron and the Conservatives are strongly tied to big media. I do not think Labour is any different judging by their actions. So one thing is for sure, their actions and comments in favour of big media over technology certainly add weight to the idea that yes, they have a much stronger lobby at very least or simply offer more "incentives" to MPs than technology does.
Re:Useless (Score:4, Insightful)
And most protective measures on the net against this are leaking like a colander.
Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Useless (Score:4, Insightful)
the MAFIAA's interest is to stop the widespread, common and easily available sharing of media. the "sheeple"
of-fucking-course the "scene" will still be alive. those people that know enough to evade prosecution, know enough to rip dvds too. but as long as you can discourage the general population (with lawsuits) from file-sharing, they might've made their point - legal and moral ambiguities as they may be.
as soon as people get pissed off enough, another Bram Cohen will emerge. Either declaring a new method or meeting the MAFIAA eye to eye in the courts - or shaking their hand.
Re:I can haz censorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOLCAZ WINS!
(insert relevant cat picture here)
So it's true. The internet, once created to distribute knowledge, exchange ideas and generally contribute to propagate information is reduced to the same crap TV was reduced to a while ago.
First they brought in the AOLlers. But I didn't speak up because they didn't step on the same turf I went, and I didn't care because "my" internet was vastly different and richer than theirs. Then they brought in the companies. But I didn't speak up because they had money, but I didn't care about their sites since I didn't plan to spend money on the internet past the online fee expense. Then they brought in the Social Networks, but I didn't speak up because I didn't want to participate in them.
Now they take away my net. And nobody is speaking up because everyone's busy surfing, buying and "making friends" to care that a part of the net that was important to me, that I considered important enough to create an outcry should it vanish. Yet nobody notices it.
Re:Rapidshare? (Score:1, Insightful)
And blocking the Pirate Bay is another brand of bullshit since the only file-sharing going on there is with .torrent files.
In addition to that, the majority of the stuff you can get your hands on by using the services of The Pirate Bay is actually legal to share.
(Don't believe me? Check for yourselves. Pick a bunch of random .torrent files and analyze what content they describe. Your findings might prove enlightening. Oh, and that's not even mentioning the fact that no unauthorized distribution of material subject to copyright takes place on, from or through The Pirate Bay. None, whatsoever. A .torrent file has nothing in it except metadata about other stuff. But y'all already know that, of course.)
Re:"Music sites." Really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once they go down the road of blocking sites they can no longer make the perfectly reasonable defence that they're a service provider, not a censor. It *is* a slippery slope and only harm will come from it. If all ISPs give in, then the next thing will happen is the government will "helpfully" step in with a national firewall and force all providers to go through it. Internet access will become as repressive as it is in Australia or other countries that think they can control people by restricting what they can see.
I'd add that sites like the pirate bay are service providers too. It may well be that most of their content is copyright infringing, but not all of it. Furthermore, they just host tracker files so Eircom isn't even preventing piracy by shutting off that site. It wouldn't surprise me either if distributed search, trackers and crypto make it extremely difficult for Eircom to EVER shut off piracy or say with certainty who is downloading the latest Ubuntu and who is just downloading the latest copy of Windows.
By the way, does anyone know a decent and affordable VPN service in the US I can subscribe to?
Re:Worse than useless. (Score:2, Insightful)
1) maybe more labels and artists will spring up that won't hamper their fans with such limitations or threaten them with lawsuits.
2) secure p2p would be sweet
3) ???
4) Profit???! (maybe for proxy operators)
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
In Germany many things are illegal ('verbotten') as long as citizens are concerned. This is immaterial as soon as some gov. agency breaks the law to get data on citizens for instance. I suppose that is what our constitution means by 'sozial'.
It is interesting to observe how they are squeezing our rights with every occasion. I stopped buying CDs long time ago and did not move to illegal copying as I did not see anything useful to copy - it may be however that soon I will be paying tax to these bastards anyway. I wonder where does this stop? OC laws and actions that could help with spamming, cyber-criminality of any kind etc are left out as they are too difficult to handle and there is no lobby to pay the fee.....
This all is very sad indeed.
Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally useless and a mere inconvenience for the die-hard file swappers. New sharing sites will pop up faster than I can say "First Post!" and new protocols to circumvent those blocks will have arrived by the time the mods have moderated "First Post" down to -1.
True as this undoubtedly is, I think this is the wrong attitude to take. Simply saying, "OK, Mr. Government, if you want to block bits of the internet go ahead, we'll just work round you." gives the impression that they have the right and justification to censor bits of the internet at will and it's up to us to work round that.
While the sort of people who read slashdot are able to circumvent this kind of thing, does that make it right to censor the internet for the rest of the less technically savvy population?
Re:I can haz censorship? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a problem with the "cult of ignorance" that is springing up. We're celebrating people and their behaviour that would have caused ridicule only decades, maybe only years ago. Take "reality TV shows" like Big Brother. Moronic lowlives whose life was already uninteresting when they weren't monitored permanently become celebrities for, essentially, being unable to communicate or to do anything meaningful with their life. Or American Idol. Young people making a complete tool out of themselves for the minuscle one-in-a-million chance to become famous (not rich. Only famous). And I'm not talking about Springer, though at least there I could imagine it's scripted and just for "tha lulz".
We live in a time when being a jerk becomes something praiseworthy. It makes you famous. Makes you some sort of role model in a way, judging by how many copycats spring up for every jackass idiot video of the "how stupid can a human being be and still be able to utter some sort of sound for communication" category on YouTube.
lolcats fall into that category. It's not funny. It's simply retarded. It's about as much fun as laughing at the retarded kid that can't figure out how to drive his electric wheelchair in any but a circular pattern. That's fun for about 5 seconds. Tops. After that, it's just plain boring, repetitive, always the same ol' crap that, if you're really honest, wasn't even funny the first time. It's especially not funny to mangle the English language "4 tha lulz". My excuse is that English is my third language. What's yours?
I love to communicate and exchange ideas. That's what I like about the internet. It allows that. The drawback is that it also allows the exchange of braindead memes.
Re:"Music swapping"? (Score:2, Insightful)
If only Ford, Chrysler and GM could compile a list of car salesrooms that are damaging their business!
If the list was compiled by a disinterested party then it's one thing. But this is just an industry lobby group compiling a list of what it doesn't like, i.e., what the companies it represents doesn't like. Legitimate uses or not, surely it is only a matter of time before bittorrent traffic is filtered out at the network level, whether it is carrying a Linux ISO or a Project Gutenberg Archive.
Re:Useless (Score:3, Insightful)