[DeVore]

Tuesday 3rd, 1-2pm in the Science Gallery (http://www.sciencegallery.com/)

Panel:
Sean Sherlock: Minister for Research & Innovation
Paul Durrant: GM, Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland.
Tom Murphy: Director & Founder, Boards.ie

Chair: John F Kennedy Editor, Silicon Republic

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So this is happening and I'm looking for crowd-sourced points to make (as well as inviting you all to attend obviously.... it will be a relatively open format I believe).

The topics are: copyright, statutory instrument 59/2012, ACTA

I'm particularly interested to hear the views of legal practitioners regarding Mr Sherlocks statements on twitter that we are not responsible for links (ala Megaupload anyone?)

This kicked off this tweet and response...
https://twitter.com/#!/seansherlockt...72276006408192


Lets not forget that ACTA is looming on the horizon so that can be covered too.

If you want any points put to him, please contribute below...

Tom.

[MadsL]

Good luck Tom!!

[Gloomtastic!]

No better man. Good luck to ya!

[KyussBishop]

I was researching this entire topic endlessly a month ago, and could have written on it a lot more succinctly then, but am catching up with work a lot right now.

Some points:

Eircom: (something I contacted Sean Sherlock about but got a limited reply)
Eircom currently block The Pirate Bay, and this was done before the recent Statutory Instrument was put in place; what is the legal basis of this block?

I don't think the SI can apply to Eircom retroactively (thus I don't think it is currently covered by SI), so does that mean the block is voluntary?

If the block is voluntary, does that not mean Eircom is able to block any website it wants on a voluntary basis?
Sherlock answered this in emails with (paraphrasing) "why would they do that?" and I answered "threat of going to court" basically; didn't get a full and proper discussion on it though, this needs enquiring.

The implications, if Eircoms website block is done on a voluntary basis, is that any ISP can block any website on a voluntary basis without consequence, which is a big censorship threat from people threatening ISP's court action, and ISP's wanting to avoid court.


Before putting questions to him on this, might be handy to get a lawyer to look through the Eircom vs EMI stuff in case I missed something obvious.

ACTA:
From what I gather in an email with the foreign ministers office, Ireland seems to support ACTA, and Sean Sherlock (or perhaps instead, others from his department) were involved in negotiating it.

I've detailed some of the major issues with ACTA in a thread I created the other day:
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/show...p?t=2056589616


I don't know enough about the rest of copyright law (and the issues with it all) to comment well on wider copyright issues.

[matrim]

A couple of questions from here :

Why is Minister Sherlock refusing to publish the advice he got from the Attorney General on SI 59/2012, despite it being Labour policy to publish such advice?

What does Sherlock think of the decision by Kader Arif the EU's Rapporteur for ACTA, resigning in protest of the signing of ACTA because of it's lack of transparency and secrecy of negotiations?

I might have some more later but that's all I have time to think about now.

I'm particularly interested to hear the views of legal practitioners regarding Mr Sherlocks statements on twitter that we are not responsible for links (ala Megaupload anyone?)

Well Megaupload is slightly different as they were providing links to files they hosted themselves. I think the technical detail that was used to take take them down was that while they deleted any links from a DCMA request, they still hosted the infringing file if there were any other links to it not in the request.

It would be more akin to asking is what the pirate bay do illegal as they just host a link to the copyright material rather than actually hosting it themselves. Especially as they are moving to magnet links and the DHT

[DeVore]

The link for free tickets is here:

http://t.co/vaY96mGb

Thanks for the feed-in so far, very useful. Keep it coming!

[Sarky]

I'd love to know what his reasons were for ignoring the alternative put forward by TJ McIntyre and co., which performed the function the SI was supposed to, but was far better-written and eliminated a lot of the vague hand-washing "let the judges figure it out" nature of his own version.

[matrim]

DeVore, I sent you a PM about the possibility of getting the SI submissions before this. Let me know what you think

Also about this debate. Can you try to have it recorded and put online for those of us who can't make it?

[hardCopy]

Originally Posted by matrim

Also about this debate. Can you try to have it recorded and put online for those of us who can't make it?

A live stream or a YouTube upload would be great, I'd love to see this but will be in work.

[meglome]

I'd like to know did he feel the articles in the press were actually reflective of the concerns people sent to him. The press coverage (at least initially) was very much that people were looking for a completely unregulated internet and one where you could download all you wanted for free. That was certainly not reflected in the threads on boards.ie. The suspicion obviously was that this was the governments own spin to the press.

[RichieC]

Best of Luck! I look forward to hearing it.

[RichardAnd]

Good luck to you sir. Make sure the venal excuse for a statesman gets a good grilling.

[Orion]

Will he turn up or will an urgent issue keep him away? He's going up against two very influential people in "Internet Ireland" who both know the subject matter very well. If he can answer all questions without bullsh1t I'll be impressed.

[DeVore]

Thank you for the compliment ... As for your prediction, I'd stay tuned on that, somewhere around Monday might bring a popcornesque news story.

[Pride Fighter]

Might go along to this. Should be a good event. Give em hell Dev