[Article] Music-swapping sites to be blocked by internet providers

As I said before this is a slippery slope


If you are an Eircom customer, switch tell them they suck, they quickly change their minds once stupid decisions not based on legal precedent backfire on them and shave their profit margins


If your isp is threatened, contact the media! The IRMA are acting like a mafia racketeering organisation, once you give in to these people thats it your screwed

Whats there to stop them blocking sites like youtube or bebo? plenty of copyrighted material there, actually i hope they are stupid enough to do that, once little Mary cant polish up her profile and listen to the latest chart ****e heads will roll

vibe666 wrote: »

there are so many different ways around every type of blocking they *could* implement it's not even funny.

if china can't block it's citizens from accessing forbidden sites then i don't see that it will be any different here.

people may not be very aware of the ways and means to get around these things but trust me that as soon as stuff people want access to is blocked, they'll start to get very creative and methods of circumventing whatever blocks are in place will be come common knowledge.

and then you have the quagmire of European law to get though if you want to stomp on peoples freedoms on a large scale. i don't see them getting very far either way.

yes some people would always find a way, but majority of "newbies" wouldn't and they will have no way of finding out as sites such as boards dont discuss information on how to circumvent censorship

I dont feel comfortable with Chinese style censorship in this country just so it suits the music industry cartel

its a slippery slope to hell

BastardPrince wrote: »

Irish law and Swedish law arent the same especially in respect to copyright....

hoping to get site going tonight which people can use to email a number of people to display their disgust about eircoms recent decisions. each email will be addressed to eamon ryan, rex comb, the ceo of babcock & brown, brian cowen, john gormley, enda kenny and ruairi quinn. anyone else worth sending a complaint to? comeg maybe?

also if anyone wants to help it would be great, just registered the domain there - in work at the moment but hoping to have somehting up around 9 tonight. keep an eye on boycotteircom.com

no but we are both in EU

and theres no courtcase in Ireland against the pirate bay or any other such site

whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

if Eircom block a site that is ruled to be legal then it will smell very bad

disclaimer: i hate bittorent i think its slow and i dont support illegal filesharing, but as someone working in IT industry i can see the huge amount of damage censorship can do to this country, note how none of the googles and facebooks originated in China, you cant grow large sites in an environment laced with censorship and fear

Cabaal wrote: »

First off no need to make your text larger, making you text larger does not get your point accross any better

it doesn't matter if The Pirate Bay is cleared of all charges it is still largely seen as operating outside of the law, if they were operating within the law the would actively monitor what files people are linking to and remove them accordingly...something youtube and bebo do which has been seen by the general user and the media alike.

Given that the pirate bay contains more links to copyright material then legal material is is seen as operating outside of the law

seen by whom? there is no legal precedent or case in Ireland against this site in particular (eircom wont stop at the pirate bay)

this is censorship that is not grounded in any legal case or court order

shame on eircom

good thing i ditched them many years ago for poor customer service and overall rippoff

also @Cabaal please answer why all the moderators have taken such a stance on this matter? are them Eircom ads all over the site (one in bottom of this thread) paying Boards Ltd so well, censorship will hurt boards.ie one day too, i hope yee can see that for all our sakes

towel401 wrote: »

i hope this will backfire on them but really it won't. Pirated music is what got the whole broadband thing started but crappy low-energy centralised social networking and video sites are what will keep it going. the likes of youtoob that will take down anything that is asked.

soon google will handle 100% of all email as people take the lazy way out and close down their own server. so they can censor that too. they'll make it impossible to get by without using the big content providers

stereotypical forum mods seem to support DRM and be totally against piracy. but i think its just a stance - they probably have a torrent client running in the background themselves

what gets me is that since Eircom is the largest ISP this might force other ISPs to follow

now that would be abuse of their monopoly status on ADSL and is unfair on consumers who might want their broadband broad and unfiltered

whichever way the moderators here spin it (they seem to be the only ones in favor of this strangely) this is censorship that is not grounded in law

look thru the headlines on tech sites today, If you were a Google of this world would you think twice before investing here (terrible economic policies aside)

grrr this is maddening

Cabaal wrote: »

ISP's, The media, other websites the vast majority of users on pretty much any site...there's a very good reason why if you link to it on boards.ie you get banned.

Bottom line is goto The Pirate Bay today and list all the legal linked torrents versus illegal...come back to me with the numbers ...

yes but no legal court or law has ruled that they are illegal

here read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence its one of the foundations of all western legal systems, this Eircom **** undermines that, do I really need to spell it out? but then again it says "Authoritarian" next to your username, perhaps we should dispense with our capitalist/socialist system and turn communist, that worked out great in the past.

you really are missing the big elephant in the room here Cabal i am sorry to say it, since this is the internet i might not be able to change your opinion that censorship is bad and a slippery slope but i will damn try hard to ensure that poor Eircom users understand that they are being screwed (again) and this will affect other ISPs and their customers

.

Iago wrote: »

I know this is going to get lost in the righteous (or otherwise) indignation but what everyone seems to miss here is that eircom and any other ISP will only be implementing this once a court approves it.

eircom have said that they won't challenge this in court, but it's still up to IRMA to prove a case for blocking sites based on copyright and Irish law for each and every website they want to have blocked. Otherwise the judge will just throw it out.

it's not like IRMA can just say, "ok we want you to block X site now, do it"

so have thepiratebay being ruled to be illegal in Ireland? and if not so why are Eircom wanting to block them

it's not like IRMA can just say, "ok we want you to block X site now, do it"

thats unfortunately exactly how its gonna happen

this all started with Eircom's 3 strike thingie (pointing at their TOS was the excuse given by some)

now Eircom are gonna start blocking sites

whats next?

as i said in older thread this is bad very badTM and things are getting progressively worse

I dont like my freedoms being eroded by a bunch of racketeers :mad:

Iago wrote: »

eircom don't want to block them, or at least according to the article they don't.

IRMA believe that thepiratebay is an illegal site. They will have to build a case to prove this, then they take that to a court and the judge agrees with them or doesn't.

If the judge agrees and places a court order then eircom and every other ISP will have no choice but to abide by that order.

All that eircom seem to have said is that if IRMA put that case together then eircom won't lodge an objection before the case is heard. Their objection wouldn't have been on behalf of the site anyway, but rather on the whole "ISP is just a conduit and is therefore not responsible for policing file sharing on it's network" which clearly they should be.

Again your second edited in point is wrong. IRMA will have to build a case that a judge will approve rather than just pick sites at random.

thank you for well written post

but you are wrong on one thing. Eircom waved their whole "ISP is just a conduit and is therefore not responsible for policing file sharing on it's network" with their previous 3 strikes thingie, they left themselves wide open for attack and what's worse is their dominant position in the market is gonna affect other ISPs whether they like it or not

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Sparks wrote: »

I get a similar sensation from people who call others apologists because they point out what the law actually says rather than what it would be rather nice for it to say.

please point to the law that says linking to stuff is illegal or any precedent law case for that matter

once again, the burden of proof is on the prosecution

just to show how rediculos this whole thing is, i can buy an advert on this page and point it to any file, will boards out of sudden become an illegal entity for linking? OMG!!

.

Cabaal wrote:

Not referring to a law here, simply if the torrent allows you to download copyright material then its breaches your ISP's T&C's....this apply's to every ISP.

I fail to see how a .torrent file hosted on a server in Sweden violates my T&C's?

My concern is with a corporate body, in league with an ISP, deciding what we can or cannot access on the internet. There is no legal basis for denying anyone access to this website. First it will be filesharing sites. Whats next? Are we in the EU or in China here?