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

Scruff · 29-01-2009 10:32am

they are talking about it on the Gerry ryan show atm.
/hangs head in shame for listening to this show

lmimmfn · 29-01-2009 10:37am

hill16dub wrote: »

firstly eircom can't even run their own company competantly imo do you actually think they can master this crap.
Secondly they would lose a hugh amount of their clients to rivals.
thirdly this settlement was only made to cut the legal bill and avoid a large pay out

its wait and see for eircom.

Knowing their track record it will be a long wait

lol, very true

zillmere · 29-01-2009 10:37am

lmimmfn wrote: »

whats your problem? explain to me whats wrong with that information?
im talking about ISPs that are using Eircoms access network, not Eircom being the ISP.

How is eircom going to contact UTV/Vodafone/whoevers customers based on a public ipaddress used by UTV/Vodafone/whoevers, how can eircom tie that public ipaddress to a customer? they cant, they need to contact the ISP and last i checked other ISPs havnt agreed to this.

Firstly, the article & entire discussion is about Eircom, not other ISP's. Secondly, OF COURSE Eircom knows exactly what IP addresses belong to its customers and what IP addresses belong to another ISP & which one. Eircom sell backbone access & IP ranges on to other ISP's. They are the only company with cable in the ground in Ireland. I am not 100% sure about the wireless providers but if they are using Eircom DNS servers then they know what IP range they use.

There is a lot of totally wrong info being posted here about IP addresses. Of course they are accurate & can be used against you. Look at any child porn court case.

jor el · 29-01-2009 10:39am

lmimmfn wrote: »

whats your problem? explain to me whats wrong with that information?

Everything.

lmimmfn wrote: »

im talking about ISPs that are using Eircoms access network, not Eircom being the ISP. Eircom are both an access provider and an ISP, the article states:

Other ISPs are not included in this agreement, so re-sellers of eircom broadband, and ISPs that don't use eircom at all, have nothing to do with this.

When it says "internet provider addresses", they mean the Internet Protocol, IP, address, which is assigned by eircom, to eircom customers. Internet Provider address, is meaningless.

lmimmfn · 29-01-2009 10:41am

jor el wrote: »

Everything.

Other ISPs are not included in this agreement, so re-sellers of eircom broadband, and ISPs that don't use eircom at all, have nothing to do with this.

When it says "internet provider addresses", they mean the Internet Protocol, IP, address, which is assigned by eircom, to eircom customers. Internet Provider address, is meaningless.

that is NOT what the article states, go back and reread it
again:

Under the settlement, the record companies will supply Eircom with the internet provider addresses of all persons who they detect illegally uploading or downloading copywrite works on a peer to peer basis.

Internet provider address is NOT just eircoms IP address its the ISP's IP addresses, if it was just Eircoms ip addresses it would just state that

jor el wrote: »

Internet Provider address, is meaningless.

It is if you havnt got a clue what youre talking about

zillmere · 29-01-2009 10:42am

Forgot to add, yes Eircom are totally useless, nothing will ever be done about it, I never bother with P2P anyway it is ****e.

The sooner the music industry sets up a proper web network where people can buy tracks directly from the artist & cuts out all middle men including the newest middle man Itunes, the better.

Sherifu · 29-01-2009 10:44am

Scruff wrote: »

they are talking about it on the Gerry ryan show atm.
/hangs head in shame for listening to this show

This has to be the greatest load of cock i've heard in a while...

yoshytoshy · 29-01-2009 10:48am

Someone just mentioned about the ip renewed after reboot.
No one has a way of knowing it's the same person except for eircom.
How can the record companies prove one person is a repeat offender ,without eircom sharing information ?

Edit : I've never actually used p2p myself ,it's actually put it in my mind now.

darkestlord · 29-01-2009 10:58am

Maybe Gerry Ryan should get someone that knows what they are talking about.:D
Does anyone use Lime wire anymore.I thought only kids used that.:p

But one thing I wanted to ask.Are eircon planning to monitor what websites you go on or are they watching what you download.
Because if they are monitring what sites you go on - a proxy would be useful.
But for the time being I'll wait and see what happens but someone will think of a away around this problem.
Eircom cannot even secure their wireless connections so I dont think they will win this war.:D

20goto10 · 29-01-2009 10:58am

There should be a mass exodus from Eircom, hit them where it hurts and they'll change their minds quick enough and it will also give the other ISP's a reason to not take up this agreement.

p.s How much dosh are Eircom getting for this "agreement"? It must be something substantial.

lmimmfn · 29-01-2009 11:00am

20goto10 wrote: »

p.s How much dosh are Eircom getting for this "agreement"? It must be something substantial.

I doubt theyre getting anything( probably just saving on legal fees ), but it would be very very interesting if they were

Nearly tempted to switch over from TodayFM to Gerry Ryan to listen to his ranting

jor el · 29-01-2009 11:06am

lmimmfn wrote: »

that is NOT what the article states, go back and reread it

That article on RTE is full of errors.

lmimmfn wrote: »

Internet provider address is NOT just eircoms IP address its the ISP's IP addresses, if it was just Eircoms ip addresses it would just state that

As I said, Internet Provider Address, is meaningless. It is far more accurate to presume that they (quite obviously) mean IP address, and not the IP addresses being used by other ISPs.

"Internet Provider address", would be the street address of an ISP, such as Vodafone, or BT Ireland. I don't know why IRMA would be providing the address of other ISPs to eircom, since eircom are probably fully aware of where their wholesale customers currently reside.

If they were actually giving the IP addresses of customers of other ISPs, to eircom, then they would say that, and not "the record companies will supply Eircom with the internet provider addresses of all persons who they detect illegally uploading or downloading copywrite works on a peer to peer basis", which is obviously talking about eircom customers, which is what the entire agreement, and article, is about.

lmimmfn wrote: »

It is if you havnt got a clue what youre talking about

No, you're the one who hasn't a clue, as I've pointed out on a number of posts now.

lmimmfn · 29-01-2009 11:13am

jor el wrote: »

No, you're the one who hasn't a clue, as I've pointed out on a number of posts now.

lmao, youre just too funny

Orion · 29-01-2009 11:14am

aidanodr wrote: »

AS I SAID: "The ruling means a precedent has been set and all other ISPs in the Irish market will now have to cooperate with the music industry."

SO THEIR NOW ...
Aidan

Just cos it's on Silicon Republic doesn't make it true. It was an out of court settlement not a judge's ruling therefore there is no legal precedent.

shebop · 29-01-2009 11:16am

Let's try and look at this from a legal point of view and add some perspective here:

The record companies (I don't know which ones) purposely targeted Eircom to 'test' whether or not an ISP would be willing to comply with regulating the sharing of their intellectual property rights (IPR). This is absolutely nothing new, and similar legal proceedings have been brought against 'monopoly' ISPs like Eircom around the world. Very generally speaking, the record companies have had little or no grounds to enforce ISPs to comply for a plethora of reasons, one of the main reasons being, that an ISP is an intermediary and not responsible for the direct internet conduct of its users. Record companies are keen to test these cases in different jurisdictions to find an ISP weak enough to bend over and serve its needs and establish a precedence. It looks like they found that with Eircom.

Eircom's willingness to comply shows the absolute disregard and apathy they have towards their customers (what's new, I hear you say?).

What this boils down to is the record companies being sore over the lack of control over technologies THEY fund to invent, ultimately taking it out on the consumer by finding ISPs as pathetically weak and anti-consumer as Eircom.

As a lot of you already have mentioned, there is a lot of hot air involved with threats made against P2P downloaders. The law simply is not adequately reflective of the real status out there, and bully tactics employed by record companies to trump the consumer time and time again are frankly tiresome.

Eircom on the other hand, show they have no backbone, no actual awareness of the overall ethics behind intellectual property and licence agreements 'standardised' by rich fatcats, and quite frankly are a coward.

Why support them??

It's very simple- change ISP and slap Eircom for being so downright disrespectful to you as their customer, or simply ignore them, continue downloading and be rest assured, that unless you are sharing files en masse, profiting or being 'unreasonable' with your downloads, then there is very little as it currently stands that can be brought against you.

Eircom Employees, if you are reading this, you ought to be ashamed of your wholly regressive and cowardly treatment in serving and representing your customers. This test case could have set wonderful precedent for not just Irish law, but intellectual property law in general. You failed to take a challenge on the basis of fear, lack of information and quite evidently from what is coming out in the news today, ignorance.

jor el · 29-01-2009 11:16am

yoshytoshy wrote: »

How can the record companies prove one person is a repeat offender ,without eircom sharing information ?

The record companies won't know anything about the individuals involved. They also won't know anything about repeat offenders, as the IP addresses are shared, and reset every 24 hours. It will be up to eircom to sanction repeat offenders, or those who ignore the warnings.

darkestlord wrote: »

Are eircon planning to monitor what websites you go on or are they watching what you download.

They won't be monitoring anything, apart from what they already monitor. All ISPs are required, by law, to keep logs. They will not be doing anything new because of this agreement.

20goto10 wrote: »

There should be a mass exodus from Eircom, hit them where it hurts and they'll change their minds quick enough and it will also give the other ISP's a reason to not take up this agreement.

p.s How much dosh are Eircom getting for this "agreement"? It must be something substantial.

I doubt there'll be any change in eircom's customer base, or minimal anyway. The number of people effected by this will be low. The other ISPs are also sure to follow suit, unless they want a lengthy, and possibly costly, legal battle on their hands. If eircom aren't fighting, the others will likely not fight either. There was no mention of money, and I would guess that there will be none.

This is not a bad thing. eircom have saved themselves a costly legal battle, a cost that would ultimately be borne by the customers. They have saved their customers from being caught up in legal threats, and fines, from IRMA (which has happened in the past). IRMA and it's cohorts, can now be placated by seeing that "something" is being done, where as before nothing was being done, to stem the illegal sharing of their property. Your details will not be passed on to other companies, you will not be sued, you will not be fined, you will not face court appearances.

This is a good thing, for pretty much everyone, except if you're one of the ones sharing thousands of copyrighted music tracks.

lynchie · 29-01-2009 11:20am

And for those wondering about Eircom being able to trace the IP address, their accounting package radius, will log every log-on / log-off attempt in a database which records your telephone number, ip address, bytes downloaded, bytes uploaded and length of time online with a date / time stamp. So even if you get a different IP address from their DHCP servers every day, once Eircom have a date/time and ip address they can say which telephone number had that ip address and from there they can get your account number to identify the household.

watty · 29-01-2009 11:23am

What Record companies do:

By various methods[1] they gather the IP address and time/Date. Unless the "whatever it is you are downloading from" has your real IP address, you can't get the packets back. Dynamic or Static IP is not relevant.

They give the IP and date/time to the ISP (eircom in this case), they know from the address range which ISP it is as that is all public. They have no idea where it is or who it is.

What the ISPs do:
They can almost instantly accurately know who was using that IP, if the time /date is correct. Sometimes it's an hour or hours out due to UTC/Summertime/Local time issues. In which case the wrong user is identified.
The ISP gives NO information at all to the RIAA or whoever.

The ISP then contacts the user...

Why an ISP might like this
Heavy P2P users are not much liked by ANY ISP. They don't care if all of them are cut off (light / occasional ones they don't care about). About 10% of users can eat 80% of capacity. Hence Caps, throttling and such.

Deep packet inspection (if it was ISP responsibility to see who is running P2P) has a number of problems:

It's very expensive.
Encryption and port 80/443 connections probably defeat it.
It can't reliably identify copyright material or even legal BBC/Sky/C4 P2P

Getting the IP from 3rd party with assurance that it is used for illegal P2P only requires them to change the T&C to say "If a copyright holder gives us an IP that is identified with your connection at the time and they assure us it was for illegal file sharing or download we reserve the right to disconnect you" or similar.

It becomes someone else's problem, costs them nothing and even improves the network more than a Cap + throttling does.

I'd assume that the ISP will check traffic of the user identified and not bother issuing a notice for light users. The RIAA or copyright holder never actually gets to know who is issued with warnings or disconnected as the Data Protection Act would be broken.

Issues:
There needs to be some right of appeal. There is zero transparency as to how the Copyright holders get the IP.

The hour can be wrong on time = Wrong User
Landlord may be sharing the connection via Router and Switch to 10 separate tenants without telling ISP. (ISPs hate this). = Which User?
The clandestinely obtained information could be simply wrong.

[1] Various Methods:
The RIAA and others have various schemes using 3rd party companies:

set up their own bittorrent clients
set up fake (but possibly functional) trackers
possibly even newsgroup or other servers
hack the trackers to get connection details
install root kits, trojans etc to monitor on the users PC

The 3rd party companies don't tell the Copyright owners exactly how they do what they do to try and keep the RIAA's hands clean.

Finally

The onus is on the Copyright holder to prove than an IP at the stated time was used to infringe their copyright. This is not transparent nor provable nor does there appear to be an appeals mechanism. However if you never get near your Cap you might not ever be warned. The ISP is only doing this as it absolves them of spending serious money, saves them money and makes it someone else's problem.
The price of CDs and DVDs is not relevant to breaking copyright. I agree that it's proven in history than piracy, smuggling and forging increases as the price is artificially increased. Piracy indeed is greatly reduced when the physical media is more affordable. People do prefer the real media
Yes, the price of legal downloads is often higher per album and lower quality than a CD. This is stupid. DVDs on re-release are often cheaper than re-released CD. New CDs can sometimes be the same price as new DVDs. This is stupidity. But CD and DVD prices have fallen.

Orion · 29-01-2009 11:23am

thomashood10 wrote: »

Yeh the record companies will be, that's my point. And the record companies will be handing those IP's to Eircom. Those IP's will NOT pinpoint your PC within a network.

edit: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Zoom all the way in, this is how close those recording companies are going to get to you.

Apparently I'm located in the middle of a river.

gg

Dear god. That's a general location based on the information available to that site which is shag all.
Eircon, on the other hand, have actual logs which tie that actual IP address to your actual account. It's not a geographical location - it's an accounting & billing detail. The letter will be to the bill payer for that account.

PaddyTheNth · 29-01-2009 11:27am

yoshytoshy wrote: »

Someone just mentioned about the ip renewed after reboot.
No one has a way of knowing it's the same person except for eircom.

They're the only people who need to know, and your IP won't actually change unless you reboot the router...and even if you do, it's not always guaranteed. Even so, Eircom still know exactly which IP is used by any account at a given time, and this IP is what they are supplied with by the anti-p2p people.

darkestlord wrote: »

Are eircon planning to monitor what websites you go on or are they watching what you download.

No, they'll just be handed a list of IP addresses by the anti-p2p folks and they'll match those addresses to the accounts which were using them at the time and say 'you've been caught sharing files, stop it or we'll disconnect you.'

And to everyone using IP incorrectly, IP means Internet Protocol, not Internet Provider for ****s sake, as I think has been said by one person. I hate when articles are written by people who clearly don't have a clue what they're talking about.

beefyjohn · 29-01-2009 11:27am

It Simple.

Eircom monitors all there network usage and knows exactly what traffic is passing through it. they use servers to keep a record of exactly how much youve downloaded. thats how there able to put a cap on everybodys account.

They log all ips given to customers and if they have any intelligence at all more than likely an ip range will be associated to specific region. so your ip will be easy to monitor as it will retain the same subnet gateway and probably the same first 24 bits of your ip.

So in a nutshell we are all screwed and we all need to get off eircom dsl lines and that includes all the resellers as they come off the same lines.

shebop · 29-01-2009 11:29am

This is not a bad thing. eircom have saved themselves a costly legal battle, a cost that would ultimately be borne by the customers. They have saved their customers from being caught up in legal threats, and fines, from IRMA (which has happened in the past). IRMA and it's cohorts, can now be placated by seeing that "something" is being done, where as before nothing was being done, to stem the illegal sharing of their property. Your details will not be passed on to other companies, you will not be sued, you will not be fined, you will not face court appearances.

This reads as nothing more than cowardly to me on Eircom's part. How can Eircom customers be saved when they are being dictated as to what they can and can't do online? Let's not forget, a lot of p2p IS legal. It seems realistically much more problematic for record companies (or is it eircom who will have this onus) to fund in resources to be able to determine what files are being lawfully exchanged on p2p networks?

Code, thankfully dictates.

Copyright is an essential tool and of course a very necessary right to creators seeking to protect their work.

HOWEVER, time and time again technology companies show absolute disregard to the essence that is copyright;

e.g. Why suddenly is it ok for record companies to bully ISPs/the consumer against a technological flaw(?)/reality regarding p2p sharing, when, for example, they lay silent on the fact that 18 months ago, according to Irish copyright law, it was ILLEGAL for people to purchase a CD, rip it onto a computer and sync it with their iPod? Why were the record companies not sueing Apple or dishing out legal threats to mp3-player users then?

This boils down to the fact that record companies are bitter and sore about technology they funded to create work against lining their pockets and are using a distorted approach to copyright law to try and rectify things. Copyright and current technology (particularly code) simply open up a whole other kettle of fish that, if properly test, would inevitably work against the record companies. How Eircom nonetheless complied is something else and something their users should be aware of ....

lostexpectation · 29-01-2009 11:33am

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/01/irish-isp-agrees-three-strikes-against-its-users The difference is that an ISP is not a court; and its customers will never have a chance to defend themselves against the recording industry's accusations and "proof". To whom, without judicial oversight, has the ISP obligated itself to provide meaningful due process and to ensure that the standard of proof has been met?

shebop · 29-01-2009 11:39am

Anyone willing to give this 3 strike deal a go then? I wonder what would happen ... oh no, we might get cut off and have to change ISP? How would it stand if other areas of copyright were brough in to a defence. e.g. Boards.ie using that YouTube link which is another intermediary-harbourer of content trumping copyright .... it's a minefield.

L31mr0d · 29-01-2009 11:41am

I personally welcome this decision by Eircom. Like was said the less torrent users out there the better.

Although, I can't see how this will have any effect on users of file storage sites and usenet, who usually download archive files from an index that have no descriptive details in their titles. Couple this with SSL and encryption and I'd say it will be a while before anything like this will have a large effect on piracy. I'd say the only apparent change will be the amount of people jumping ship from Eircom once they get wind of this.

I'd say the only people who will get caught out by this are your beboers with limewire who don't really know what they're doing anyway.

Personally, I haven't downloaded music in ages, I prefer to use music streaming sites like grooveshark and songza. I rarely commute so I only really listen to music when I'm at a PC.

apope8 · 29-01-2009 11:42am

Much easier way to download music.
1) Find a public music video on youtube
2) Download the video using realplayer or something else.
3) Use a program like total video converter to extract the audio as an mp3!

Takes about 2mins altogether!

Done, Dusted, Legal!!!

ZeRoY · 29-01-2009 11:43am

corkonian0110 wrote: »

good for Ireland, thats rubbish - as mentioned earlier, the monitoring of ip addresses and record company's reporting it to Eircom - = embarrasing for Ireland.

This has been the case for at least the past 2 years .... Mediasentry has been sending copyrights infringements to ISP but since they had no obligation to do anything with the reports noone got warned/disconnected.

As for the detection, how easy can it be? Just use any Torrent / P2P type software and you can get a list of IP connected to the trackers.... a submission to www.ripe.net to match IP with ISP and your are done.

Orion · 29-01-2009 11:43am

L31mr0d wrote: »

I personally welcome this decision by Eircom. Like was said the less torrent users out there the better.

I agree - more bandwidth for us usenet leechers

barnicles · 29-01-2009 11:43am

Mostly what Media Defender etc. Do is make decoy torrents or seed decoy files on proper torrents. They also use all the bandwidth of the seeders, so leechers torrents will crawl.

Fighting Irish · 29-01-2009 11:44am

yoshytoshy wrote: »

in a way stuff like this is good for ireland ,especially if we are to become more competitive in the IT area of business.

:rolleyes:

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

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