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EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal have sued Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, demanding that it install filters to prevent users from illegally sharing or downloading music.
The action was admitted by Mr. Justice Peter Kelly to the Commercial
Court, meaning that it will be heard on an expedited basis.Eircom has
said that it is not on notice of specific illegal activity that
infringed the rights of the companies and has no legal obligation to
monitor traffic on its network. Previously the music companies had
sought to have Eircom voluntarily install software such as that
produced by Audible Magic, which will "fingerprint" music files, but Eircom refused indicating that it could not run that software on its servers.
The Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI) has previously said that it opposes any filtering of this sort, with General Manager Paul Durrant saying:
"The Association is totally opposed to any obligation (such as that
apparently in this Belgian court decision) that ISPs should monitor all
of their customers' Internet communications on the off-chance that
someone may be distributing copyrighted work which they do not have
permission to use. (How is an ISP, or any other third party, to know
whether a communication is copyrighted, who owns the copyright or
whether permission has or has not been granted?)
The privacy of all personal and business communications is at stake
here. This is the electronic equivalent of the post-office steaming
open every letter in the sorting office, checking the contents and
never delivering the bits some unknown worker believes should be
censored. If legislation forced ISPs to monitor, never mind the
democratic or moral issues, in practice everyone would immediately
switch to encryption rendering any such monitoring useless, the
monitoring process itself would slow the Internet to an unusable
snail's pace."
Digital Rights Ireland
has condemned this action, saying that it will jeopardise the privacy
of internet users, add to the cost of broadband, "overblock" legitimate
files, and ultimately be easily circumvented by encrypted peer to peer
programs.
Irish Times, Eircom taken to court over illegal music downloads
RTE News, Record firms seek to ban illegal downloads
Digital Rights Ireland, IRMA v. Eircom - Why ISP filtering for the music industry is a bad idea (11.03.2008)
Paul Durrant (ISPAI), Comment
Source: EDRI-gram "Ireland: Music industry sues ISP, demands filtering" Number 6.5, Mar. 12, 2008
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