Eircom in high court

Screaming Monkey

Four major record companies have brought a High Court action to compel broadband service provider, Eircom, to prevent its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music. http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0310/download.html

Sounds like a shakedown to me..

The "Audible Magic Corporation software" looks a bit ropey as well, a 1U appliance with a web gui, and does signature matching, Wow that will solve all your problems EMI
http://www.audiblemagic.com/products-services/copysense/

Theta

Fair play to Eircom who said basically no to it already before. Lets hope they hold out and tell them to F-off. I dont like this current trend on internet policing!

JimmyCrackCorn!

If its not ok to listen to your phone calls its not ok to listen to your broadband.

A warrant is needed for a reason and at the end of the day everyone would just move to encrypted p2p anyway for downloading whatever.

I personally don't like giving up civil liberties that were hard fought and hard wone.

Theta

Well I don't either but we will have to face up to some things being observed, for example from the end of March Eircom and all the other ISPs will be recording all of its customers browsing activities. But this is different is my mind, if your recording fine the data may never be looked at and it will only be used if required with a warrant but filtering web content illegal or not is still censorship, but the problem with Ireland is that this will go to court and some 100y/o Judge who hasn't got a clue about how the internet works or how it should work will just view this as a copyright case and it will go down the ****ter for us!

Capt'n Midnight

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

"research" says that 1 in 40 downloaded songs is legal.
does this include encrypted connections ?
does this include peer to peer without publicly visible sites ?
does this include people sharing stuff with their mates ?
IMHO 2.5% legal downloads sounds high. And most of that 2.5% is itunes, not the record company sites.

If 97.5% of your customers won't pay the price you are asking for your product and you have a monopoly on that product, then I think it's pretty safe to say you are abusing your monopoly.

If the record companies have a €20 album and they claim that there are 40 downloaded copies of it out there, then they are only making 50c per album. In the past you could justify the higher price of physical media due to real production and distribution costs. Now where those costs have dropped to nearly zero...

Perhaps they can look into copyright law too. In countries with a welfare state the argument that you need to provide for your children makes no sense. Reverting back to a 17 year period would mean that rights holders would try to maximise sales rather than sit back and try to sue later on.

/2c

probe

They (MPAA & Co) might as well go after Volvo and Mercedes Benz for manufacturing trucks that are used in the transportation of pirated DVDs and CDs, or the NRA for building the roads that these trucks use to transport their booty. While one has little time for the eircom monopoly, or for pirates, telecommunications companies are common carriers, and shouldn’t be held to account for the contents of every packet they carry.

Aside from the practicality of deciphering and decrypting every packet (which would be impossible anyway without perhaps a €1 trillion investment in computing power), who is going to pay for such surveillance? The consumer. Both in terms of increased bills and loss of privacy.

No thanks.

The industry would be better deploying their resources to deliver more HD movies and a next generation better than CD quality sound product, at reasonable prices that people would want to buy. We’ve been stuck with CD quality sound as consumer recording quality for almost 30 years.

In 2008, recorded sound quality should be of the same quality as live music. If they delivered this (no big deal – just up the bit rate with 7,1 sound, in the package), the download size would be way above the capacity of an eircom “broadband” connection!

[It would give eircom a perfect defence. “Our broadband is so slow, your honour, we will show that it is impossible for any subscriber to download even a single song in under 24h”].

And while they are at it, have a look at "Hollywood's" $$$$$$$$$$ political contributions and the absence of competition in the industry......

.probe