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."
Useless (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
SWEET (Score:3, Interesting)
Next up, socially and politically insensitive speech, porn, nude/violent/graphic images, low price merchants, and communication with unenlightened societies.
So many to choose from, it makes me dizzy just from thinking... oh, thinking!
Re:Rapidshare? (Score:1, Interesting)
Or youtube for that matter?, there are many times where I go on Youtube /just purely/ to listen to music.
Will that be blocked aswell? :-)
Podsafe Music (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Meanwhile in financial news... (Score:5, Interesting)
I just scanned the article but this looks like a misleading subject.. basically only one ISP is doing this (although it's the biggest), and the others have been threatened with legal action (just like what is happening here in Australia, with one of our ISPs targeted by the media industry and currently getting sued [ausgamers.com] (disclosure: our site) for not taking action against file sharers).
So, this is basically ISPs caving to legal threats - which I guess either means they're complete pussies, or they have deals with the ISPs to provide content themselves (ie, sell music to their subscriber base) so its in their financial interests to comply, or they've actually crunched the numbers with their lawyers and Irish law doesn't look so good for ISPs.
If that latter is true, THEN I would believe reduced revenues might be likely - or if this ISP is just the biggest because it has a monopoly on infrastructure or whatever. If it's not though, users should just vote with their feet and jump ship on this ISP and go to one that is not going to tell them what they can and can't do with their Internet connections.
Re:Worse than useless. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Music sites." Really. (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Podsafe Music (Score:5, Interesting)
...that will prove how incompetent and underhanded the music industry [is]
Incompetent? No. just that they see no need to actually verify that the content actually violates their copyrights. Besides, according to TFA, the agreement is that IRMA will supply lists of site they deem harmful to their business. Clearly, in their view, indy artists giving away music is harmful to the businesses of IRMA.
How about some counter-threats? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Find some reasonably popular band who is sharing, or is willing to promote their music on torrent sites.
2. Throw out a little press, get a reasonably large number of people outside Ireland to download/seed.
3. Sue the IRMA for tortious interference with contract, anti-trust, whatever shit you can make stick.
4. Profit?
Since it's not the government you can't really demand your rights from a private ISP but it seems to me that they're then also opening themselves up for lawsuits based on interference with business, something you couldn't do against a law.
Re:How about some counter-threats? (Score:2, Interesting)
Didn't Nine Inch Nails already do steps 1 and 2 ?
I'm not Irish so I can't help you with step 3.