[ILUG] Eircom surrenders

[Justin Mason]

Paul Mc Auley writes:
>On Thursday 29 January 2009, Phil Bradley wrote:
>> 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:)
>
>If I've got this right, the complainer or their agent will send a notice to 
>Eircom saying "we say that IP address 12.34.56.78 violated copyright on High 
>School Musical 7 : Dole Office, at 23:45 on Jan 30th, 2009" and then Eircom 
>issue their warning notice.
>
>It's better than some of the other options like trying to compel the ISP to 
>block certain traffic, to reveal the subscribers identity or to run their 
>magic fingerprint spotting technology on all traffic.
>
>This is probably the least hassle way all round for this to sort it out but 
>it'll be interesting seeing how Eircom cope with the delivery of notices and 
>whether they go about fixing the WEP thing at the same time.

One big issue -- there's no penalty if the record companies make incorrect
allegations.  The investigative company previously used by the RIAA in the
US, MediaSentry, at one point alleged a network printer was sharing
movies, and reportedly there have been many other similar cases.  So
I expect there'll be lots of false positives...

--j.