[ILUG] Eircom surrenders

[Phil Bradley]

Paul O'Malley - gnu's not unix - wrote:
> James McBoyle wrote:
> 
> data protection act violation anyone?


Not really, an IP address is not likely to be considered to be
personally identifiable information under the meaning of the data
protection act, otherwise your web logs would be considered to be
personal data and sending them to google (for example) would count as
exporting personal data outside of the EU.

According to the article, Eircom will warn/cut off its customers,
there's no data protection violation there. If the record companies want
to take legal action against an Eircom customer they would have to
convince Eircom's legal team to do so. Whatever you might think about
Eircom, their legal team are probably aware of their data protection
obligations. Even in the US, which has vastly weaker data protection
legislation than the EU, you read about John/Jane Doe cases where the
record companies are attempting to force the ISPs to disclose the
identity of their customers, so it's likely that the plaintiff would
need to get a court order (just wanting to to issue proceedings against
someone doesn't help you with this type of discovery, at least in civil
cases).

I don't particularly like Eircom and I think they have misled uninformed
customers into thinking that they were entitled to download music by
virtue of paying for broadband (their adverts definitely used to imply
this) but really, exchanging copyrighted material is already against the
law and a warning and/or disconnection is a proportionate (IMO) rebuke.

My main concern is that Eircom will equate all P2P activity with illegal
activity and disconnect customers for distributing Ubuntu ISOs (it would
fun to watch that argument in the supreme court:)

  -phil