[Article] Eircom to cut off Music File Sharers ..

smellslikeshoes

Ive been trying to stay out of this discussion since I'm sure I will get bogged down in it but I want to give my 2c.

This is not going to effect copyright infringement in any meaningful way, I would go so far as saying it will only slightly slow its growth rate. This ruling is just going to make things slightly harder, this ruling will probably be offset by growth of customers in the broadband sector as well as the rapid technological advances in broadband technology.
I don't mind admitting that in the last 24 hours Ive watched and listened to a decent bit of copyrighted material, it really is easy enough to get a hold of things without using any p2p technology.
The bottom line is this ruling will effect p2p sharing in Ireland but Pandora's box definitely is open and nothing is going to stop people sharing copyright material as a whole.

lmimmfn

watty wrote: »

Personally I don't mind the latency of connecting to Tesco, HMV, Amazon, Play, FBO etc and getting 650MByte to 1Terabyte per packet with no effect on my Cap. No need to make a seperate physical backup.

that must be handy for emails

ionix5891

Personally I don't mind the latency of connecting to Tesco, HMV, Amazon, Play, FBO etc and getting 650MByte to 1Terabyte per packet with no effect on my Cap. No need to make a seperate physical backup.

seems some moderators here are all for censorship

at the risk of being banned i will disagree with you and i have to say that has to be the lamest excuse i ever heard for violating peoples freedom of speech (yes being disconnected means harder to discuss things on sites such as boards.ie or visit government and opposition websites)

right now i can login into my neighbours wireless eircom router (the method is widely available on google) and download a load of music and get my neighbour disconnected from a vital resource that the internet has become, good thing im on good terms with them and wouldnt do such a thing, sigh

this country is truly going down the ****ter, as for €ircon they are now officially the worlds worst ISP, good think I ditched the bastards many years ago

DISCLAIMER: all comments and opinions by me are copyrighted to me, anyone on Eircom reading this will be getting a letter shortly

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yoshytoshy

ionix5891 wrote: »

at the risk of being banned i will disagree with you and i have to say that has to be the lamest excuse i ever heard for violating peoples freedom of speech (yes being disconnected means harder to discuss things on sites such as boards.ie or visit government and opposition websites)

right now i can login into my neighbours wireless eircom router (the method is widely available on google) and download a load of music and get my neighbour disconnected from a vital resource that the internet has become, good thing im on good terms with them and wouldnt do such a think, sigh

this country is truly going down the ****ter, as for €ircon they are now trully the worlds worst ISP, good think I ditched the bastards many years ago

So violating your neighbours rights is free speech ? Do you actually have any command of the english language or are you stupid on purpose ?

ionix5891

yoshytoshy wrote: »

So violating your neighbours rights is free speech ? Do you actually have any command of the english language or are you stupid on purpose ?

i said it can be done, i didn't say i would do it, read the post

but there are other people out there who would fall that low and that would affect innocent people ...

after reading a few posts back i cant believe we have a people advocating a Chinese style Great Firewall, shame on yee


DISCLAIMER: all comments and opinions by me are copyrighted to me, anyone on Eircom reading this will be getting a letter shortly

.

lmimmfn

ionix5891 wrote: »

seems some moderators here are all for censorship

agreed,if not all

yoshytoshy

the fact you guys say that at all ,proves how open boards.ie is to discussion.
if people were to start talking about where to buy some crack and what the best way was to take it ,would the mods be accused of censorship for asking people not to discuss it ?

ionix5891

yoshytoshy wrote: »

the fact you guys say that at all ,proves how open boards.ie is to discussion.
if people were to start talking about where to buy some crack and what the best way was to take it ,would the mods be accused of censorship for asking people not to discuss it ?

since when does receiving a few bits of data (0100011101001100101111010011) equals to selling crack?

Eircom are not following any law here, all ISPs are protected by the DMCA style safe harbor provisions and this has been tested and upheld in court plenty of times in many countries

instead Eircom have decided to screw their customers and in turn have opened a pandora's box that could affect other ISPs (using their monopoly status again to wreck the market)

if you get a letter from an ISP and not a court you are assuming/accusing the customer of being guilty, that is not ISPs job and its certainly not RIAA's / MPAA's job (whatever their irish equivalent is) thats a legal decision for the courts that needs to be based on law and evidence, maybe if Eircom spend more time upgrading their network and not wasting time on this they could provide a better service

as for the moderators, seeing that one of them was advocating using NAT for all ISP customers and blocking all ports only a few posts back, we've yet to see whether they resort to censorship yet, you can find these comments in google cache if anything



DISCLAIMER: all comments and opinions by me are copyrighted to me, anyone on Eircom reading this will be getting a letter shortly

.

lmimmfn

yoshytoshy wrote: »

the fact you guys say that at all ,proves how open boards.ie is to discussion.

hows that? its a forum and no different to any other forum, there are rules on what can and what cant be discussed. You can post on the EA UK forums that EA products are crap and not be banned or have your thread closed so why is this considered so open?

Im surprised all mods are so pro Eircom doing this and support IRMA wholeheartedly,of course theres nothing wrong with that as we're all entitled to our opinions

ionix5891

ironically theres an Eircom advert in the bottom right of this page advertising downloading of music and films

so boards.ie are directly profiting from eircom

DISCLAIMER: all comments and opinions by me are copyrighted to me, anyone on Eircom reading this will be getting a letter shortly

yoshytoshy

Personally ,don't know how the mods put up with this crap. It was a great thread at the start ,now it's just going around in circles.

lmimmfn

ionix5891 wrote: »

ironically theres an Eircom advert in the bottom right of this page advertising downloading of music and films

so boards.ie are directly profiting from eircom

Theres absolutely nothing wrong with that, servers and bandwidth cost money and we should be happy its free for us.

I dont see them anyway, Adblock Plus FTW!!!!

but you do raise the point that even Eircoms ads on the radio talk about downloading music and movies lol

yoshytoshy wrote: »

Personally ,don't know how the mods put up with this crap. It was a great thread at the start ,now it's just going around in circles.

so all those who disagree with what happened should be banned from these forums? or the thread should be locked?

ionix5891

Personally ,don't know how the mods put up with this crap. It was a great thread at the start ,now it's just going around in circles.

you haven't addressed any of the points that were raised by me and others, theres no legal obligation on Eircom to do what they did, if anything they have opened themselves up now to possible lawsuits since they decided to discard their carrier status and dabble in censorship


moderators can lock the thread but then they will be loosing out on 30cent (or more?) per 1000 advert views that boards Ltd gets paid, in this case ironically by Eircom

thebman

Isn't that what landed them in this mess, they were even advertising on <snip> so they couldn't deny they were promoting piracy.

ionix5891

thebman wrote: »

Isn't that what landed them in this mess, they were even advertising on <snip> so they couldn't deny they were promoting piracy.

yah thats what happened

tho they do have a defense they should have used

the advertising was contracted/outsourced to a 3rd party advertising agency whos job is to deliver to as many people as possible in ireland for as cheap as possible, and obviously this crowd didnt do a good job at checking where the ads are shown, eircom got what they paid for

one will notice that the pirate bay would show google adverts from time to time (due to clever iframe tricks by shady advertisers) even tho google banned that domain from showing ads as they dont want to be associated with them

yoshytoshy

ionix5891 wrote: »

you haven't addressed any of the points that were raised by me and others, theres no legal obligation on Eircom to do what they did, if anything they have opened themselves up now to possible lawsuits since they decided to discard their carrier status and dabble in censorship

Theres no points being made that weren't discussed already. Eircom advertise on the site and I know what they are advertising ,even though I don't p2p.
Youtube ,itunes ,movie reviews is all part of the web for the majority of people.
Just because you see the web the way you do ,don't presume everyone else does.

lmimmfn

thebman wrote: »

Isn't that what landed them in this mess, they were even advertising on <snip> so they couldn't deny they were promoting piracy.

maybe, didnt realise they we're advertising on <snip>, lol, thats seriously crazy.
Wonder if they'll change their ads now though, the music part is fine as theres itunes to do it legally, last i checked theres nowhere for us( there are a few for the US ) to download movies legally( theres iplayer and sky player but thats about it )

thebman

Oh I know they may not have realised but it is ammunition for the courts.

PaddyTheNth

yoyo wrote: »

Its fine once they have the snoopers IPs in the blacklist, but like everything, the chance of the snoopers being blocked could be slim, esp if they change network address

Nick

Yet again, not all **AAs actually bother to confirm that the files are as described.

They don't need to connect to YOU to see that you have the files - http://compnetworking.about.com/od/bittorrent/f/bttracker.htm

PaddyTheNth

ionix5891 wrote: »

right now i can login into my neighbours wireless eircom router (the method is widely available on google) and download a load of music and get my neighbour disconnected from a vital resource that the internet has become, good thing im on good terms with them and wouldnt do such a thing, sigh

This is really the only issue people can have with this.

If people start getting accused in error Eircom can check their logs and see what their traffic was comprised of...if they put in place mechanisms to appeal their infringement notices.

The issue of of an unsecured network is a mess though, as it would be massively hard to prove either way.

However claiming that Eircom are going to be infringing people's rights is a joke. If you use their service you have already agreed not to share copyrighted material. In my opinion they shouldn't have that agreement in their T&C because they should just be a service provider and they are certainly not part of the constitutionally appointed police force, but it is there, and all that is going to be happening is that they will be inforcing their T&C, albeit acting on notifications from external sources.

However this could just be the start of it as they could easily place mp3's on web servers and entrap people, meaning that would be accessible from corporate lans and the likes

Considering the work involved in such a situation where the network is already secured to the extent that they have to entrap people from within the network, and the liabilities incurred in doing so if they are caught, when they almost certainly would be, and the ridiculously small return for the risk incurred, I think that this about as likely as us being attacked from an alien base in the center of the sun.

E: I misread this, apologies. Granted that is a possibility, albeit it very remote imo.

ionix5891

PaddyTheNth wrote: »

Considering the work involved in such a situation where the network is already secured to the extent that they have to entrap people from within the network, and the liabilities incurred in doing so if they are caught, when they almost certainly would be, and the ridiculously small return for the risk incurred, I think that this about as likely as us being attacked from an alien base in the center of the sun.

not like they havent resorted to entrapment before with MediaSentry

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/02/mediasentry-role-in-riaa-lawsuit-comes-under-scrutiny.ars
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123109364085551895.html

If you use their service you have already agreed not to share copyrighted material.

I underlined the word you in the above quote deliberately, as I already mentioned a quick google search would turn up ways of accessing eircom accesspoints since these are very weakly "secured"

Eircom should have stuck to the rights afforded to them by law as an ISP, by doing what they did they (the first isp in the world to do this and they weren't even ordered by court to do so) are opening themselves and their customers to be full cavity searched by lawyers (note that they bowed down to the music industry, there are other industries as well probably polishing their teeth at the scent of blood)

I couldnt care if Eircom go under, they did enough harm to this country with their monopolistic practices dragging their feet behind them for years, but dragging the customers down with them is wrong, and many innocent people will be affected who had no intention of copyright infringement


ill put it this way. are the post office responsible if an envelope containing antrax is sent thru their system? the workings of the mail system and the internet are not too different, but one can see from the above example why this is so ridiculous

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PaddyTheNth

ionix5891 wrote: »

not like they havent resorted to entrapment before with MediaSentry

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/02/mediasentry-role-in-riaa-lawsuit-comes-under-scrutiny.ars
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123109364085551895.html

There's a world of difference between

looking for available songs in people's file-sharing folders, downloading them, and using those downloads in court as evidence of copyright violations

and what was suggested in the post I replied to, which was somehow placing copyrighted files within an already secured corporate network.

The isn't much similarity between the two situations.

E: oops, I misread the original post. Though I still think that there is a fair bit of difference in the two scenarios. Not to mention that the original mediasentry fiasco would have been avoided if they'd simply got a PI license for that state in the first place.

ionix5891 wrote: »

I underlined the word you in the above quote deliberately, as I already mentioned a quick google search would turn up ways of accessing eircom accesspoints since these are very weakly "secured"

I'm assuming that when you say accesspoints you mean home/business routers supplied by eircom?

Yes, WEP is a joke, and Eircom were incredibly stupid in how they pre-configured routers with regard to that issue. WPA however is not, and all routers which Eircom ship out now come with pre-configured WPA and a passphrase which is a fair bit more than 20 chars...can't remember the exact number at the moment but its enough to negate the TKIP exploit.
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/11/wpa-cracked.ars

ionix5891 wrote: »

ill put it this way. are the post office responsible if an envelope containing antrax is sent thru their system? the workings of the mail system and the internet are not too different, but one can see from the above example why this is so ridiculous

As I said

If you use their service you have already agreed not to share copyrighted material. In my opinion they shouldn't have that agreement in their T&C because they should just be a service provider and they are certainly not part of the constitutionally appointed police force, but it is there, and all that is going to be happening is that they will be inforcing their T&C, albeit acting on notifications from external sources

ionix5891

http://www.tomdoyletalk.com/2008/07/26/eircom-wep-crack/

It’s been nearly 9 months since news broke that all Eircom wireless broadband connections had what I would call a major security flaw.
To penetrate any of these networks - all you need is the SSID (e.g. eircom4506 3345) and a little tool such as Damo’s Eircom WEP key generation tool. Armed with this you could have FREE internet access and unlimited download capabilities at the expense of someone else.
Yet after all this time, Eircom seem to have done nothing to patch this glaring hole. Yes, they released a simple press release, recommending that you change the password on your router - but in fairness, how many of Eircoms customers would actually know how to do this?
Eircom should be doing a lot more about this in my opinion, it’s gone on way too long now.

as for corporate networks people pay for broadband to access what they want to access, its none of eircom's concerns, how many people would pay to have draconian filters such as websense that they hit at work for their home connection?

i could understand filtering in an office environment, but at home thats going to far... not to mention little Sinnead would flip if bebo is blocked :P

it is not eircom's job to police the networks, they think they made it clean with this settlement, but the problem will comeback and bite them in the behind, they are the first isp in the world to be so stupid and it will backfire

any eircom customer who has the option to switch and has a bit of common sense should run away from them or switch as sign to Eirscum that they stepped over the line this time

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PaddyTheNth

ionix5891 wrote: »

http://www.tomdoyletalk.com/2008/07/26/eircom-wep-crack/
Yet after all this time, Eircom seem to have done nothing to patch this glaring hole.

...apart from sending every subscriber written notification of the problem and how to fix it, and changing configuration of the routers they ship.
:rolleyes:

ionix5891 wrote: »

as for corporate networks people pay for broadband to access what they want to access, its none of eircom's concerns, how many people would pay to have draconian filters such as websense that they hit at work for their home connection?

i could understand filtering in an office environment, but at home thats going to far... not to mention little Sinnead would flip if bebo is blocked

Stop spreading misinformation. This is not filtering. There is no packet inspection. Eircom act on notifications received from a third party.

ionix5891

PaddyTheNth wrote: »

...apart from sending every subscriber written notification of the problem and how to fix it, and changing configuration of the routers they ship.
:rolleyes:

seems my neighbours weren't told... and that hotel i stayed in dublin last week... :rolleyes:

jor el

ionix5891 wrote: »

seems some moderators here are all for censorship

How did you come to that conclusion? Anyone who is a mod in another forum, is simply a poster in this one, no more, no less. The moderators of this forum cannot, and will not, support copyright infringement, regardless of their own personal opinions on the matter.

ionix5891 wrote: »

at the risk of being banned i will disagree with you and i have to say that has to be the lamest excuse i ever heard for violating peoples freedom of speech (yes being disconnected means harder to discuss things on sites such as boards.ie or visit government and opposition websites)

No one gets banned for disagreeing with another poster. Freedom of speech is just one of the rights that people have. Copyright protection is another, and must be weighed up against another persons right to free speech. If you are found to be in breech of one law, it may come to it that your rights are curtailed as a result.

ionix5891 wrote: »

right now i can login into my neighbours wireless eircom router (the method is widely available on google) and download a load of music and get my neighbour disconnected from a vital resource that the internet has become, good thing im on good terms with them and wouldnt do such a thing, sigh

The insecurity in eircom's routers is another issue altogether. As of yet, we don't know what exactly eircom are going to do with the information provided to them. We don't know if they're going to investigate, or take the users feedback on board. So we can't say, with any certainty, that victims of WIFI theft will be disconnected because of it.

ionix5891 wrote: »

Eircom are not following any law here, all ISPs are protected by the DMCA style safe harbor provisions and this has been tested and upheld in court plenty of times in many countries

There are no DMCA style laws in Ireland. The only time, that I'm aware of, where ISPs were brought to court because of user actions, the courts ordered the ISPs to hand over subscriber details to IRMA, so the ISPs lost. In that case, the ISPs themselves were not being held accountable for the user actions, by court or IRMA, and I'm not aware of any court case in Ireland where this has been tested.

ionix5891 wrote: »

instead Eircom have decided to screw their customers and in turn have opened a pandora's box that could affect other ISPs (using their monopoly status again to wreck the market)

if you get a letter from an ISP and not a court you are assuming/accusing the customer of being guilty, that is not ISPs job and its certainly not RIAA's / MPAA's job (whatever their irish equivalent is) thats a legal decision for the courts that needs to be based on law and evidence, maybe if Eircom spend more time upgrading their network and not wasting time on this they could provide a better service

Again, we still don't know what the contents of these letters will be, or how and when they will be issued. All we have now, is that eircom have agreed to accept IP information from the music companies, which they will claim are from copyright infringers.

ionix5891 wrote: »

as for the moderators, seeing that one of them was advocating using NAT for all ISP customers and blocking all ports only a few posts back, we've yet to see whether they resort to censorship yet, you can find these comments in google cache if anything

What are you on about? Nobody here is being censored, except if you mention, or link to, illegal material.

ionix5891 wrote: »

Eircom should have stuck to the rights afforded to them by law as an ISP, by doing what they did they are opening themselves and their customers to be full cavity searched by lawyers (note that they bowed down to the music industry, there are other industries as well probably rubbing their hands together at them smell of blood)

This is true. Anyone who feels that they were unfairly accused/disconnected by eircom will be able to take legal action, should they choose to. This is a good thing, but my hope would be that eircom will do the sensible thing, investigate the claims made on the IP addresses, and rule out mistakes, so it wouldn't come to that.

ionix5891 wrote: »

ill put it this way. are the post office responsible if an envelope containing antrax is sent thru their system? the workings of the mail system and the internet are not too different, but one can see from the above example why this is so ridiculous

It's not practical for An Post to open and inspect every single piece of mail, just as it's not practical for an ISP to inspect every single packet of Internet traffic. This is not what's happening anyway.

A closer example would be when the FBI took over child porn sites, continued to supply the material to people, then used the credit card details to locate them and search for evidence. The FBI supplied the incriminating evidence, and then went to look for it.

In the eircom case, the music companies will supply copyright material on file sharing networks, get the only information they can, an IP address, and hand that over to eircom to deal with. How exactly that is dealt with, is an unknown at this point.

This post by watty, explains it quite well, also this one is worth reading again.

PaddyTheNth

ionix5891 wrote: »

seems my neighbours weren't told... and that hotel i stayed in dublin last week... :rolleyes:

If you choose not to act on the information provided to you that is your prerogative.

watty

eircom made themselves potentially liable for copyright infringement for two reasons:
1) Their misleading advertising
2) Their T&C claiming you could be disconnected for copyright infringement.

Those two things seriously damage a "Common Carrier" defence.

Third problem:
Also in Irish law (criminal & civil) there is the established legal precedent of damgages + costs awarded for helping others to infringe copyright and proscecutions under criminal law for aiding and abetting theft.

eircom was likely to lose the court case, hence the out of court settlement which is not law, does not set a legal precedent and is not overseen by the courts. The Rights Holders dropped the charges due to the civil agreement entered into with eircom. This agreement can't be described as curtailing free speech, though the Rights Holders (not eircom) *MIGHT* be breaking some other law, somewhere, depending on how they obtain the date/time, IP addresses and verification of content.

eircom can disconnect now or before under existing contract T&C made with them. They never needed any evidence that stands in a court of law.

Copyright infringement is covered by civil law mostly and the ability of the Rights Holder to sue. There is no reasonable limit to damages which can x100 more than any criminal penalty. The evidence presented to Judge/Jury only has to be "reasonable" not to the standard of Criminal evidence. So if an "expert witness" says it is likely that Mr X did download/unload then Mr X can end up with paying 40,000 Euro damages and 60,000 Euro in costs (his own and Rights Holders).

Yes the way they calculate damages is about 1000x or more too high. But the Judge/Jury only takes that into account. It's not what gets awarded.

I'm not a fan of how eircom or the Rights Holders do things. However lets have facts and not mis-information, wishful thinking or hysteria.

Greed on parts of Rights Holders, the ease of sharing digital media, difficulting in getting out of print content, the fact the Rights Holders should be making it easier to buy legal digital content and that they are losing this "war" or illegal methods of IP gathering in some cases does not justify copyright infringement.

Individuals can be Web 2.0 and share their own stuff via CC, and starve if they choose. Most programmers, videographers, photographers, writers, musicians and other originators like the almost universally agreed to Geneva Convention on Copyright.

The originator has automatic copyright unless assigned by agreement to another. The Rights Holder decides on publishing or not and is entitled to royalties. Often if you are employed on a regular wage the employer has the Rights, otherwise those royalties are your income.

It's not theft like taking a physical item from a shelf. But you are devaluing the work of the creator and may be depriving income. You *HAVE* abused their rights of expression under Geneva convention. Despite what DVD trailers say Copyright Infringement is not Theft in criminal law. But it is a form of theft in a moral sense and an Infringement of rights that can be subject to criminal law and Civil Damages claims.

BTW if/when the Rights Holders "lose", if they lose badly it will mean almost the end of decent new music getting professionally recorded and published. It will become very hard to find decent new content.

Home Tape could never kill vinyl and certainly not CDs. But Digital content "sharing" might kill physical media (inc eventually DVDs and Bluray) and most decent recording/publishing which will mean everyone loses.

kaimera

not sure if it's been mentioned but there was a comical piece in one of them morning papers in DUB today [metro am or the hearld not sure which] with a guy ranting about the eircom thing.

watty

Like MORE comical than some of the hysterical and "tinfoil" rants here?

eircom, RIAA, IRMA: Please note I have not received the item discussed in the post today. maybe AnPost intercepted it in "a deep packet inspection"?

EDIT: The future?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/02/emi_brand_sponsorship_please/