p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Ireland’s largest ISP, eircom, feeling the wrath of the feral corporate music industry in its tireless fight to gain complete and total control of how, and by whom, music is distributed online, has undertaken to rat out its own users.

Stomp Anyone Who Gets In The Way, is the official Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG stance in their bizarre war against their own customers.

Eircom won’t block The Pirate Bay, absent a court order, the IDG News Service has a spokesman saying. But that still leaves companies such as Blacknight in the firing line.

“I don’t want to get into the entire IRMA vs Eircom and IRMA vs ISPs debacle,” says the company’s Michele Neylon.

IRMA is short for Big 4’s Irish Record Music Association.

Michele goes on »»»

The only reason I’m even writing this is because I’m getting a bit tired of all the “quotes” of “quotes” and other unclear and misleading things that people have been saying about ISPs over the last few weeks.

To start with, we at Blacknight are not an access provider.

Basically that means that we do not provide broadband services (internet access)  to anyone. We provide hosting, domain registration and a lot of other services.

We are, however, members of both RIPE and ISPAI

So I was more than a bit taken aback when we got a letter from solicitors representing IRMA (EMI, Sony, Universal Music and Warner).

“Sorry it’s a PDF, but I wasn’t going to type it out again!” – he says

No worries. Below is an excerpt we keyed in. From a Dublin law firm representing the Big 4, it goes like this »»»

The settlement agreement provided that our clients will supply eircom with the IP addresses of all persons who they detect illegally loading or downloading copyright works and that eircom will, upon receipt of this information, implement a graduated respoinse which will firstly inform its broadband subscriber that its subscribers IP address has been detected infringing copyright; will secondly warn the subscriber that unless the infringement ceases the subscriber will be disconnected and may take steps to throttle the subscribers broadband service; and finally in default of compliance will result in the disconnection of the subscriber. In addition to this eircom has agreed that they will not oppose any application clients may make seeking the blocking of access from their network to the Pirate Bay websites or similar websites.

It is the position of our clients that by this agreement eircom has agreed to comply with its statutory duty under section 40(4) of the Act to remove the material infringing our clients Copyright from its facilities.

Please confirm that Blackknight will also work with the record industry to end the abuse of the Internet by peer to peer infringes and that it will, if it receives IP addresses from the record companies of persons they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyright works, operated a similar graduated response and that it will disconnect the subscriber in default of compliance.

“Since we don’t provide access, as I’ve already said, I don’t see how this can affect us, so I instructed our legal counsel to tell them as much,” says Michelle, to wit:

Dear Sirs,

We act as solicitors for Blacknight Internet Solutions Limited who have handed us a copy of yours of the 13th inst.  We have explained the contents in detail to our clients who acknowledges your clients situation. 

It is most important to note however that our clients are a hosting provider.  This is distinct to an access provider and our client therefore does not offer DSL or other internet access services. 

We understand that the agreement with Eircom relates to DSL services, which make illegal filesharing possible.  Again we reiterate that our clients do not offer this service.  Nor does our client have any subscribers as outlined in your letter.

We sympathise with your clients, we hope you will see that our clients are not involved in such activities and therefore we would be grateful if you would kindly revert and confirm our clients cooperation and also a release from any legal action as mentioned in your aforesaid letter.

He adds »»»

Obviously we cannot and will not condone any illegal activity on our network and will quite happily enforce our terms of service should we find them breached.

However the reality is that most of the “illegal content” that we do find on our network ends up there due to servers being hacked or people using weak passwords, though there have been exceptions!

Ultimately as a service provider we have to be answerable to our clients as well as the law. So if someone gets a court order we will act on it, however we will not share client data with $random 3rd parties.

If you have an issue with one of our clients for whatever reason then get a court order – sending us silly threats isn’t going to work. Seriously.

Demanding that ISPs act as a replacement for the judicial system, due process and all those lovely things that we expect in a democracy, is unreasonable. Apart from anything else the privacy issues cannot be ignored.

From a purely business perspective.. it’s a bit like David taking on Goliath in some respects.. While there are several large ISPs being targetted, others wouldn’t be much bigger than ourselves in terms of staff numbers etc., It’s highly doubtful that any of the smaller providers could really afford to engage in a lengthy and costly legal battle.

I guess we’ll see how things progress in the coming days and weeks …

Indeed.

Stay tuned.

rat out its own users – Eircom caves in to Big 4 labels, January 29, 2009
won’t block -  Eircom says it won’t block The Pirate Bay, February 25, 2009
IDG News Service – Irish ISP: We Won’t Block The Pirate Bay, February 24, 2009

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Music, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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