Eircom to cut broadband over illegal downloads

Lockstep

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0524/1224271013389.html

EIRCOM WILL from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally.

Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of “graduated response” is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.

The Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma), whose members include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner, reached an out-of-court settlement with Eircom in February 2009 under which the telecoms company agreed to introduce such a system for its 750,000 broadband users.

The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner.

Mr Justice Peter Charleton ruled in the High Court that a broadband subscribers internet protocol (IP) address, which Eircom will use to identify infringing customers, did not constitute personal information.

It is understood that, during the pilot phase, Eircom has agreed to process about 50 IP addresses a week. Irma is using a third-party firm, Dtecnet, to identify Eircom customers who are sharing, and not simply downloading, a specific list of its members’ copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks. The operation of the scheme will be reviewed after three months.

Dick Doyle, director general of Irma, said his organisation could potentially supply Eircom with thousands of IP addresses a week but it was a matter of seeing what the internet service provider (ISP) was able to process.

Infringing customers will be initially telephoned by Eircom to see if they are aware of the activity on their broadband network. If the customer is identified a third time, they will have their service withdrawn for seven days. If they are caught a fourth time their broadband connection will be cut off for a year.

Mr Doyle said international research suggested 80 per cent of people will stop illegal file-sharing if they get a letter from their ISP warning them of the consequences. “We are trying to encourage people to go back to legitimate networks to get their music,” he said.

Record companies are lobbying to have a graduated-response mechanism enshrined in law in other jurisdictions.

Cable operator UPC has resisted requests from Irma to implement a “three strikes” system and the case is in the courts next month. Last night, a spokeswoman for UPC said it does not see any legal basis for monitoring or blocking its subscribers’ activities.

Personally I think this is disgraceful and am unsure as to how they will manage to differentiate between legal and illegal filesharing without a flagrant breach of privacy. If someone is illegally sharing files then surely this is a matter for the record company itself and not something for the ISP to get involved in (aside from T+C breaches)

What particularly irks me is that a third party firm searches through the traffic and hands it to IRMA who hands it to Eircom.


At any rate, I sincerely hope that this will cause people to "vote with their feet" and switch to alternate providers (I was an Eircom customer back in Ireland and found the service very poor)

wes

Agree with the above, a truly ridiculous state of affairs. To be pronounced guilty on accusation alone is nothing short of absurd and wrong. Eircom clearly thinkgs IRMA and there ilk, are there customers.

Eircom customers should switch as Eircom is treating them all like criminals.

OhNoYouDidn't

wes wrote: »

Agree with the above, a truly ridiculous state of affairs. To be pronounced guilty on accusation alone is nothing short of absurd and wrong. Eircom clearly thinkgs IRMA and there ilk, are there customers.

Eircom customers should switch as Eircom is treating them all like criminals.

Exactly, what about legal torrent usage such as copyleft and classical/trad music?

Would be fascinated to see what market share eircom lose here.

Bottle_of_Smoke

Why are eircom going along with this? I mean that as a genuine question. What possible benefit are they getting here?

Eircom: We're cutting you off your service if you continue downloading songs
Customer: Right so I won't be able to use the internet?
Eircom: Actually no you could go to one of our competitors who aren't tracking your activity and cutting you off accordingly
Customer: Is this a prank? Is this smart telecom up to dirty tricks?

Lockstep

I think Eircom are in a catch22 situtation; they're having financial troubles now so possibly they were forced to cave in by the Record Companies waving a potential legal battle in front of them which they couldn't afford.

And so they're presumably going to lose many clients, putting them in even more financial difficulty.

Lockstep

Bottle_of_Smoke wrote: »

Why are eircom going along with this? I mean that as a genuine question. What possible benefit are they getting here?

Eircom: We're cutting you off your service if you continue downloading songs
Customer: Right so I won't be able to use the internet?
Eircom: Actually no you could go to one of our competitors who aren't tracking your activity and cutting you off accordingly
Customer: Is this a prank? Is this smart telecom up to dirty tricks?

I think it's because they lack the finances to get into a legal battle.

Open for correction here.

nacho libre

as long as the other providers don't follow suit. i'm interested to hear the views of the libertarians on this subject.

wes

OhNoYouDidn't wrote: »

Exactly, what about legal torrent usage such as copyleft and classical/trad music?

Would be fascinated to see what market share eircom lose here.

No idea, what they will do in such cases. Still, as you rightly point out, plenty of legal filesharing.

BluePlanet

nacho libre wrote: »

as long as the other providers don't follow suit. i'm interested to hear the views of the libertarians on this subject.

Well, i imagine it goes like this:

1. you do not have a right to broadband, or internet
2. ISP's are free to do whatever they want with your internet.
3. You are "free" to choose another provider.
4. Return to Step 1.

Lockstep

I would imagine most libertarians believe in privacy rights. Which this is a breach of.

P. Breathnach

kickoutthejams wrote: »

I would imagine most libertarians believe in privacy rights. Which this is a breach of.

They also believe in property rights, of which intellectual property is a subset. So we have a question of balancing one right against another.

I await the libertarian verdict with bated breath.

BluePlanet

P. Breathnach wrote: »

They also believe in property rights, of which intellectual property is a subset. So we have a question of balancing one right against another.

I await the libertarian verdict with bated breath.

Yeah, but aside from intellectual property rights, on a physical layer the actual bytes of data are coming from the ISP.
The ISP own those bytes and will have authority over what happens to them.

We can remove intellectual property rights from this discussion.
Say your ISP doesn't want to service your broswer request to one of their competitor's websites.
I'm sure the ISP will have the right to refuse those requests (ie: drop those packets), under Libertariansim.

Banned Account

P. Breathnach wrote: »

They also believe in property rights, of which intellectual property is a subset. So we have a question of balancing one right against another.

I await the libertarian verdict with bated breath.

It will be a question of balancing the cessation of freebies (meaning the corollary effect of having to hand over their cash) with an ideology - libertarians wallets usually win out in the end.

Permabear

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OhNoYouDidn't

donegalfella wrote: »

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Isn't the point though that these are the new T&C's brought in after the court case and not the contract the overwhelming majority of users signed? This is an add on.

Fundamentally, illegal downloads are between the user and the copyright owner and ISP's should not be held responsible for use/misuse of their service by customers, in the same way phone companies, car manufacturers etc are not.

Permabear

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pooch90

donegalfella wrote: »

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If you want a valid comparison, you would say its okay for Eircom to monitor and record all phone activity in case you decide to harass someone.

OhNoYouDidn't

donegalfella wrote: »

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Sure, but you implied that all eircom BB customers had signed that clause and therefore should have no objection to its enforcement. Context etc.

donegalfella wrote: »

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But they couldn't monitor the line in case you harrassed someone.

silverharp

In a situation where I recorded a concert off the radio, put it on a CD and sent it to a friend through the post, I dont think people would accept that all media sent through the post should be examined as it would infringe privacy rules I'd assume. An Post or the Radio station would also kick up blue murder if they were made a party to any litigation. I dont see a big difference here. If you accept the current IPR rules then the music industry would have to find other ways of tracking down people that upload or download if both acts are deemed to be illegal.

Slightly off topic but personally I am of the view that property rights ought to be restricted to the physical atoms that are in your possession (this is very debatable and am aware of the counter arguments) but the idea that the second caveman that attempted to build a house owed a royalty to caveman 1 doesnt stack up for me. Emulation is your friend!

Permabear

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ei.sdraob

Thank you eircom

I've been exploring setting up vpn services on my servers for last few months, already have a network of http gateways on few hundred ips over several countries for my crawlers/scripts...

if i could figure out a way of automating VPN provision with some glue code here and there, its cha-ching time


Tho where i will be moving soon the choice is either between wireless or eircom none of UPC goodness like now

BehindTheScenes

Was bound to happen eventually, shame so much free music out there waiting to be downloaded.

pooch90

donegalfella wrote: »

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Except this shows that where the "rights" of one very rich organisation are weighed up against the rights of millions, then the one with the money gets his way.

The only way to fight this would be to form and, most importantly fund, a group to aggressively sue eircom for breach of privacy - or to lobby the govt to ensure that there are actually privacy laws for internet users.
Either that or make every politician who comes to your door commit in writing to pursuing privacy laws for net users.

OhNoYouDidn't

donegalfella wrote: »

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I 100% agree with that, but the point is that they made this agreement out of court with IMRA. They were the only ISP who accepted the demands be placed on them, and to me thats not only morally and legally wrong of them, its a kamakazie business move.

sink

kickoutthejams wrote: »

Personally I think this is disgraceful and am unsure as to how they will manage to differentiate between legal and illegal filesharing without a flagrant breach of privacy. If someone is illegally sharing files then surely this is a matter for the record company itself and not something for the ISP to get involved in (aside from T+C breaches)

What particularly irks me is that a third party firm searches through the traffic and hands it to IRMA who hands it to Eircom.

At no stage is anyone monitoring traffic and snooping in on your private business. If you download illegally from a P2P network you are doing it in full public view.

Due to the nature of P2P networks anyone who connects to a swarm (i.e. downloads a file), shares their I.P. with everyone else in that swarm. All anyone has to do to gather a list of I.P.'s sharing the latest Britney Spears album is to join the swarm and copy the list of connected peers. You can do this yourself in most clients including uTorrent and Azureus by going into the details tab and looking at peers. This makes it easy for rights holders to gather a list of I.P.'s downloading their property illegally. They then identify all the eircom I.P.'s pass on all the details and eircom will then decide whether or not to take action. There is little or no chance of anyone downloading a legal distribution being mistaken for a pirate.

Direct download services like Rapidshare and Megaupload don't suffer from the same drawbacks. When you download from them, you are downloading directly from their servers and are not connected to anyone else. No one but Rapidshare and Megaupload can see who is downloading what and so the rights holders have no means of tracking who is downloading illegally.

Eliot Rosewater

silverharp wrote: »

In a situation where I recorded a concert off the radio, put it on a CD and sent it to a friend through the post, I dont think people would accept that all media sent through the post should be examined as it would infringe privacy rules I'd assume.

You were doing it in moderation, too. It's always been the case that people would share CDs and records, but the Internet brings this sharing to a new level with large scale copyright infringements made possible. If you've a fast Internet connection you could download a hundred albums a day. It's not as if people who download lots of music are going to go out and buy it thereafter. So in the end, the artist feels the pain.

I think the only issue here is privacy. I think that if you compose a piece of music then you own it, and that you've a right to do with it what you will. The problem is policing those people who infringe upon your IP rights, so it often comes down to a means versus ends debate.

Permabear

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Wolfe Tone

Wait maybe I'm missing something here: But whats to stop everyone from using say a proxy?

They will never be able to stop piracy, people will always find a way around any restrictions. No doubt the average internet user will be punished along the way.

PattheMetaller

So does this effect someone uploading a video to Youtube? Or, providing a link on their Facebook to a vidoe on Youtube?

Cuddlesworth

MUSSOLINI wrote: »

Wait maybe I'm missing something here: But whats to stop everyone from using say a proxy?

With a proxy you redirect all your data through another machine/server. Torrent's are bandwidth hogs and the proxy would have double the traffic you would. So it would be costly to even consider and the proxy would now be liable for the action itself.

For the people obsessed about privacy. My understanding of this operation is that as said above, they will take lists of IP's using particular torrents by connecting to the torrent themselves. These will then be checked against the IP range used by Eircom. Eircom will then be notified and will initiate proceedings internally against said customer. At no stage will either the record companies be aware of this. As DSL IP's change, only eircom will know who was doing what at what time.

UPC will be up in court next week and plans to fight it.

Cuddlesworth

PattheMetaller wrote: »

So does this effect someone uploading a video to Youtube? Or, providing a link on their Facebook to a vidoe on Youtube?

No, they would have to initiate civil proceedings against Facebook/or youtube for your IP. Then initiate civil proceedings against your ISP for your details. Then initiate civil proceedings against you. These company's will remove copyrighted material when reported though, which is the most cost effective option.