4 record companies in bid to compel Eircom to stamp out illegal downloads

Jay D

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.

The case is being taken against Eircom as it is the largest broadband internet service provider in the State.

It is the first case to be aimed at the service provider rather than at individual illegal downloaders.

The record companies are EMI records (Ireland) Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Ireland) Ltd, Universal Music (Ireland) Ltd and Warner Music (Ireland) Ltd.

They say latest figures indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide last year and for every single legal download there are 20 illegal ones.

In a sworn document to support the case, Willie Kavanagh, managing director of EMI Ireland and chairman of the Irish Recorded Music Association, said because of this illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry was experiencing a dramatic and accelerating decline in income.

He said the Irish market for sound recordings was suffering a decline in sales from €146m in 2001 to €102m last year - a drop of 30%.

He said the record companies believed the greater availability of broadband would lead to a further escalation in the volume of unlawful distribution of recordings.

EMI and the other companies are challenging Eircom's refusal to use filtering technology or other measures to voluntarily block or filter material from its network that is being used to download music in violation of copyright and licensing rights.

The companies say certain specialised software - such as that provided by the US-based Audible Magic Corporation - can block specified recordings from being shared.

Last October Eircom told the companies it was not in a position to run the Audible Magic software on its servers.

Eircom's solicitors also told the companies that it was not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the companies' rights and it had no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network.

However, Mr Kavanagh said Eircom was well aware its facilities were being used to violate the property rights of record companies on a grand scale.

He said legal actions brought against individuals with a high number of illegal files on their computers at specific times were very costly and time consuming.

He said illegal downloaders come from all walks of life and the reality for many young people was that they had never known a position where they actually have had to pay for sound recordings.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly admitted the proceedings into the Commercial Court list this morning.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0310/download.html

Well with all the yap yap out of France and the UK recently from organisations in relation to downloading illegal files, it's our turn.
Is this a first in Ireland?

Is there a just reason for an illegal downloader to be worried?

utick

maybe if these record companies werent overpricing there product there wouldnt be so many people illegaly downloading it. ive downloaded stuff illegaly before, if it wasnt availabel to download though there would still be no way i would buy it legaly

twinQuins

ISP level filtering is nothing new. I think it was only inevitable that we would be targeted, though we were lost for a time amongst the bigger players.

As to Eircom knowing their service is being used for these means...what ISP doesn't? In all honesty, if P2P services were gone tomorrow ISPs would see a marked decrease of people on the higher end of their BB products. At least to residential customers.

What kind of common carrier laws do we have? I've been following the Comcast story in the US for a while now but never gave thought to the fact that I might see something related here.
Anyway, even if Eircom complies P2P clients will simply employ tougher encryption.

invincibleirish

What a joke, why are these record companies fighting a losing battle, instead of harping back to the days when a cd was £20, the record companies need to diversify and come up with new ideas to generate profit instead of clinging onto outdated business ideas & models.

Mossy Monk

When You Pirate MP3's You Are Downloading Communism

Kinetic^

Nothing about the music they release being shìte in there!!!!!!!! :rolleyes:

Mr.Nice Guy

F*ck them anyway. Out of interest, is it illegal to record a song off of the radio rather than going out and buying it? If so we might as well make sure the radio no longer plays music. We wouldn't want those poor recording artists to lose out on any money and go hungry. They're barely getting by as it is. *Puke*

Fremen

The sooner the record companies die off, the better. Damn luddites (and I'm using that in the historical sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites )

JæKæ

No matter what these idiots come up with there will always be lads out there capable of coming up with a work around to counteract it. I'm sure the code/methods behind this 'Audible Magic' can easily be side-stepped.
It happened with DRM, there is always a work-around.
These kind of draconian tactics will only serve to turn people more and more away from buying from these companies.
Interesting points made here:
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-isp-must-end-music-piracy-080310/

'Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth'
Ridiculous, the only bandwidth it can hog is your own ie. the bandwidth you paid for.

Terry

JæKæ wrote: »

No matter what these idiots come up with there will always be lads out there capable of coming up with a work around to counteract it. I'm sure the code/methods behind this 'Audible Magic' can easily be side-stepped.
It happened with DRM, there is always a work-around.
These kind of draconian tactics will only serve to turn people more and more away from buying from these companies.
Interesting points made here:
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-isp-must-end-music-piracy-080310/

'Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth'
Ridiculous, the only bandwidth it can hog is your own ie. the bandwidth you paid for.

With the likes of Clearwire, you can hog the bandwidth of others.
However, with DSL you are just using your own.

They can battle BitTorrent all they want. the thing is, if they do succeed, something else will take its place.

If Eircom do throttle torrents, I'll just take my business elsewhere.

I'm off now to put in a blank casette and record some music from my friend's vinyl collection.

smemon

record companies suck.

why won't youtube just start up their own label, allow people to download mp3's and videos's, slap a few ads before/after video and album & then share revenue with popular bands and bang - end of record companies.

Terry

smemon wrote: »

record companies suck.

why won't youtube just start up their own label, allow people to download mp3's and videos's, slap a few ads before/after video and album & then share revenue with popular bands and bang - end of record companies.

Indeed.
Most bands make their money from touring anyway.

gurramok

He said the record companies believed the greater availability of broadband would lead to a further escalation in the volume of unlawful distribution of recordings.

There ya go, do your duty as an upstanding citizen and go back to dial-up!

He said legal actions brought against individuals with a high number of illegal files on their computers at specific times were very costly and time consuming.

They've brought action against a few dozen and they moan the cost. Just like the RIAA in the US, they cannot act against many, only the few.

Terry

I'd just like to add here that linking to torrent sites will result in a ban.
Let Google take the fall on that one.

togster

Meh i can't see why people can't just buy the music from the like of i tunes.
I can't see why people seem entitled to get something for free when it was not intended for sharing.

Red Alert

I don't like the internet being censored. Why can't they sue people the way they currently do - oh no that's right they say it costs them too much! Well it costs everyone a lot when legal cases are taken. Why should Eircom help them lower their legal costs?

Terry

Terry wrote: »

With the likes of Clearwire, you can hog the bandwidth of others.
However, with DSL you are just using your own.

They can battle BitTorrent all they want. the thing is, if they do succeed, something else will take its place.

If Eircom do throttle torrents, I'll just take my business elsewhere.

I'm off now to put in a blank casette and record some music from my friend's vinyl collection.

Eh no.

Just because you use DSL doesn't mean you have your own dedicated 3mb connection straight to the internet. There is contention at the exchange at the ISP and at multiple other stages..

But its true, they will never suceeed in totally filtering access at the ISP level. The problem is if they start doing it they start a dangerous precident and guess who will have to pay for their expensive filtering software?
Whats next after that filtering websites?

gurramok

togster wrote: »

Meh i can't see why people can't just buy the music from the like of i tunes.
I can't see why people seem entitled to get something for free when it was not intended for sharing.

If you hadn't noticed, itunes is only for the ipod and non-transferrable for the average novice user.(us techies can get around restrictions)

Also, 10% of a cd sold only goes to the artist, see here for fact.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7265070.stm

Hence the labels are stirring up the storm for years!

Eric Cartman

if you steal a handbag or a dvd somebody else is without a handbag or a physical dvd, when you "steal" music off the internet nobody is now without that music,

im a student, i dont have the money to pay for it anyway, if i didnt have p2p i would just record from the radio, or borrow and rip cd's. im not going to buy the music anyway so the record industry isnt losing any money from me

togster

gurramok wrote: »

If you hadn't noticed, itunes is only for the ipod and non-transferrable for the average novice user.(us techies can get around restrictions)

Also, 10% of a cd sold only goes to the artist, see here for fact.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7265070.stm

Hence the labels are stirring up the storm for years!

Oh right i wouldn't be as cool as you tech guys so i had no idea. So there's no other site online to buy music legally?

So you agree downöloading something that isn't your is wrong?

muppetkiller

togster wrote: »

Meh i can't see why people can't just buy the music from the like of i tunes.
I can't see why people seem entitled to get something for free when it was not intended for sharing.

Well besides the fact that iTunes is a woeful piece of sotware, The bit rates are terrible, it costs the same as the cd (And you don't get the CD), and they only accept credit cards which rules out a major amount of people.

If I can buy the cd on cdwow for 11 euro delivered from Hong Kong I'm sure I should be able to download it for 5 euro or less and save them the postage,staff and physical medium.
The music industry is a joke.

Mizu_Ger

This is ridiculous. Suing an ISP for illegal downloading is like suing the council everytime there is a car crash (they supply the roads and thus give motorists the means to cause crashes, so they are responsible!).

The record companies haven't a clue how to move into new markets.

If they allowed music to be bought/downloaded very cheaply, I bet that most of us would start buying music that we would not normally buy (I would anyway!). And the record companies would be making more, but they are too paranoid to do anything different.

hottstuff

I hope Eircom show them who's boss.lol

Dragan

Terry wrote: »

Indeed.
Most bands make their money from touring anyway.

The bands do.

The majority of money that the actually company itself makes is from Unit Sales.

You give a band profits from something other than touring and the won't want to tour!

Wazdakka

Why dont more bands go down the Radiohead route.
Alot of there last album was released for free on the website.
There was a donate if you want policy.
A very small percentage of the downloaders actually made a donation but seeing as the cash wasnt sent through all the normal bullsh1t channels of a record label the band made ALOT more cash, plus there were more downloads than forcasted record sales so better exposure.

Ps: Wooo pacman returns

:pac:........

matrim

Wazdakka wrote: »

Why dont more bands go down the Radiohead route.
Alot of there last album was released for free on the website.
There was a donate if you want policy.
A very small percentage of the downloaders actually made a donation but seeing as the cash wasnt sent through all the normal bullsh1t channels of a record label the band made ALOT more cash, plus there were more downloads than forcasted record sales so better exposure.

A few bands have done this recently, the new NIN album was released this way as was a Saul Williams album.

AFAIK Radiohead never released the full figures for downloaders vs buyers so you can't fully tell the success of the distribution method unless this is released.

Edit : I've just checked and for both of these the free version was limited. For NIN it was for 9 or 36 songs, For Saul Williams it was only available for the first 100,000 downloads

Robbo

Wazdakka wrote: »

Why dont more bands go down the Radiohead route.
Alot of there last album was released for free on the website.
There was a donate if you want policy.
A very small percentage of the downloaders actually made a donation but seeing as the cash wasnt sent through all the normal bullsh1t channels of a record label the band made ALOT more cash, plus there were more downloads than forcasted record sales so better exposure.

Ps: Wooo pacman returns

:pac:........

Because Radiohead are a well established band who have a legion of fans who would quite frankly buy a recording of Thom Yorke singing "I'm a Little Teapot" in the shower?

Jay D

Robbo wrote: »

"I'm a Little Teapot"

That's a classic tune, some of my first memories are of that being banged out.

ScumLord

**** them fat *****! There are very, very few "artists" out there that deserve to get any money for the muck they shovel out as music. They're no more artists than my dog is a ****in' pigeon. They greedy money whore's and they won't get a cent off me.

There's only one album I was willing to pay for and that was Does it offend you, yeah. Went up to Galway and no place had it. Emule had it though.

I'd be more willing to pay for Irish singers like that Cathy Davey one, Irish bands and singers do put in the effort and build up a fan base before they make it to radio.

I never thought I'd say it but go Eircom! There should be marches on the street against this kind of Nazi behaviour.

Das Kitty

My main problem with the record companies is that they've been trying to fight new technology rather than embracing it and dumping some of their money into researching methods of getting the most out of it.

Getting the ISPs to filter the content has a nasty whiff of censorship about it. If I wanted to be told what I can look at online I'd move to China.

hottstuff

Das Kitty wrote: »

If I wanted to be told what I can look at online I'd move to China.

Or even the U.S. lol

Das Kitty

Ha!

It's mainly the TV and newspapers over there that seem to be filtered. The webternet is more monitored than filtered from what I saw. If they stopped people looking up Islam, how would they catch the terrorists?

Dyr

In all fairness though, We can moan about how the big record companies are getting whats coming to them but its the smaller artists that downloading is hurting the most imo.

Trode

togster wrote: »

Meh i can't see why people can't just buy the music from the like of i tunes.
I can't see why people seem entitled to get something for free when it was not intended for sharing.

To be honest, I agree with you (well, not the iTunes part, for the reasons others stated), I don't download music I haven't bought, and I still strongly object to this lawsuit. I really don't like the idea that Eircom should be forced to monitor what it's customers are doing and either hand that information over to a third party or block certain kinds of content.
It's not like they'd be much good at it anyway, does anyone expect them to be able to tell a large legal download from an illegal one, especially if they're both coming from a torrent site? Me neither, and I'll be damned if some record company thinks they have a right to see everything I download in case they own some of it. It's like being strip-searched every time you pass HMV, on the off chance you've stolen something, or have been given something someone else stole.

cooperguy

Eircom better win this case or it sets a very worrying precident.

togster

ScumLord wrote: »

**** them fat *****! There are very, very few "artists" out there that deserve to get any money for the muck they shovel out as music. They're no more artists than my dog is a ****in' pigeon. They greedy money whore's and they won't get a cent off me.

What? Lets get this straight. You will only download music that you deem is by a "proper" artist? Thats fair enough. You should then have to pay to listen to their music.

People can't expect to get music for free. Thats bull ****. You also cannot decide what you do and do not pay for just because you deem it from a "proper" artist. Does your employer decide not to pay you some days because you did a **** days work? This whole argument is bull imo. It's stealing whether you like it or not.

Jay D

all I can say to these rip off bastard Irish record rights people is that if you do win, it won't make any difference from me because when i go out shopping for cds, it actually entails me having a look in whatever shop, taking note of certain cds, like my last one - Chris Liebing + Speedy J, Collabs 3000.
After noting it, I came home, went on ebay and got it less than a third of the price HMV in Henry st were charging.
Maybe we should make his clear to them bastards that people likemyselfare wellpast that ripped off phase that I was infor so long growing up, not having a credit card or access to the internet, clouding my mnd as to the value actually out there.

Jay D

togster wrote: »

People can't expect to get music for free. Thats bull ****. You also cannot decide what you do and do not pay for just because you deem it from a "proper" artist. Does your employer decide not to pay you some days because you did a **** days work? This whole argument is bull imo. It's stealing whether you like it or not.

hello have you been living in a cave for the past 10 years?

As far as I am aware millions upon millions of people have most certainly been able to expect and receive, music, for free. People have also decided to pay and sometimes not. whether it's right or not....

stovelid

Terry wrote: »

I'm off now to put in a blank casette and record some music from my friend's vinyl collection.

Don't do it....

phantom_lord

do they actually have a case? how likely are they to win? doesn't really sound plausible to me that they could force eircom to stop downloads.

Helix

togster wrote: »

It's stealing whether you like it or not.

wrong term, really really wrong term

its not stealing

my 2c?

download all your music for free, dont give the labels a penny, but buy gig tickets to see bands you like whether youre going to go or not. buy their official merchandise whether youre going to wear it or not, and if they do something along the radiohead/nin line of things, pay for it

let the artists make money, not the labels

paying for your cds does not financially help the artist, going to their shows and buying their merchandise does

ScumLord

togster wrote: »

What? Lets get this straight. You will only download music that you deem is by a "proper" artist? Thats fair enough. You should then have to pay to listen to their music.

People can't expect to get music for free. Thats bull ****. You also cannot decide what you do and do not pay for just because you deem it from a "proper" artist.

Of course I can. If I don't like them I don't pay for them. If these artists are doing what they love then whats the big gripe about money for? I don't like the whole attitude that these artists have. The absolute majority of them are just self obsessed assholes out to be rich and famous.

It's not the up and coming bands that are complaining either from what I can see. It's fat ***** like those in Metallica, that are already stinking rich.

hottstuff

ScumLord wrote: »

It's fat ***** like those in Metallica, that are already stinking rich.

The band has already stated the biggest mistake of their lives was the Napster thing.

phantom_lord

they didn't even sue napster due to lost revenues, it was control over their music more than anything else, the whole "i disappear" thing pissed them off.

Das Kitty

stovelid wrote: »

Don't do it....

Anyone know where I could get a high enough res version of this so I can make a t-shirt.

I'm also looking for the "Home Sewing is Killing Fashion" one but I think that's less likely.

Agamemnon

BOLLOCKS to the recording industry. Some years back, they forced CD Wow to stop selling CDs produced outside the EEA, driving up prices for the consumer. I'll support bands by going to their gigs and concerts but I could not care less about the recording industry. Anything that upsets them makes me happy. They're a shower of money-grabbing dinosaurs who can't deal with the reality of the internet age.

doonothing

To be honest, with how easy it is to get the music for free, you'd be stupid not to download it. Regardless of moral obligations to keep the record companies rich enough to exploit the artists, it's a case of common sense.

Dyr

phantom_lord wrote: »

they didn't even sue napster due to lost revenues, it was control over their music more than anything else, the whole "i disappear" thing pissed them off.

Maybe they should worry more about quality control over their music, useless washed up chancers.

phantom_lord

Bambi wrote: »

Maybe they should worry more about quality control over their music, useless washed up chancers.

:rolleyes:

Dyr

If you were even born back when metallica were a decent band you could throw eyes at me on this issue sonny. But you werent. So don't.



:pac:< ppftt kids these days

User45701

Well i dont download music so this does not effect me, ive downloaded a few things in the past but if the music is good i will pay for the soundtrack or to go see the person/band.

TV shows is another story. There is nothing wrong with downloading them if they are enw episodes because tv shows should be worldwide release, this would solve allot of problems with downloading.

Another problem is people putting DVD collections online because if you love a show you should pay for it, although the retail mark up in this country is stupid. Things like splitting seasons in 1/2 and making double the proffit. **** that.