02.23Ireland on verge of becoming music industry police state
Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, will reportedly start blocking its customers from accessing file-sharing sites, solely at the behest of the music industry. According to the Sunday Business Post, the Irish equivalent of the RIAA, the Irish Recorded Music Industry, has been threatening the country’s ISPs with legal action if they don’t do the same. And Eircom’s capitulation comes nearly a year after IRMA sued the ISP and tried to force it to install fingerprinting software that would spy on its users’ downloaded files.
From the paper’s report:
“Irma, which represents major music groups EMI, Sony-BMG, Warner and Universal, is to begin compiling lists of websites that it claims are damaging its business. It will then apply for a court order, requiring Eircom and other internet providers to block access to these sites.”
See those label names there? Make no mistake: IRMA is the RIAA in disguise, and if these usual suspects manage to strong-arm Irish ISPs into imposing a blacklist that is hand-crafted by the music industry, it’s just the beginning. The EU has been flirting with ISP filtering for quite a while — an although it struck down the idea of ISP filtering last year, an Irish precedent will almost certainly bring the issue back to the fore. Can I get another Twitter blackout protest? Well, ok, maybe not that. But something? Protest-ish?
4 Responses to “Ireland on verge of becoming music industry police state”
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Really? Another blackout protest? You didn’t find that to be . . . oh I don’t know . . . poorly thought-out and largely ineffective? I’m not even sure what it was intended to achieve.
Legislative change? I’m pretty sure your legislator doesn’t care about your avatar.
Widespread awareness? A blacked out avatar conveys zero information and is more confusing to people than informative—honestly, Molly, how many times did people @ you wondering what was going on?
Sticking a tinyurl in the avatar would have made infinitely more sense, but hopefully it wouldn’t have linked to the site which was the impetus for the whole blackout thing because that site contained zero information about how Kiwis could actually take *effective* action—no legislator contact information…nothing except a call to black out your icon.
Twitterverse kneejerk reactions are annoying. About the only thing this was good for was playing blackout bingo in the little following grid.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
Yeah, I agree, actually. I was sort of joking about the blackout; I think I’ll update to make that more clear.
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] weiteren zu sperrenden Portalen. Wie sich die anderen ISPs des Landes verhalten werden und ob die Sperren von Dauer sind, ist noch [...]
February 23rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I am willing to stop listening to U2 in fact I am already doing it
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:28 pm