taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

As Adrian noted last week, IRMA are demanding that Eircom block the Pirate Bay — first on a list of websites they don’t like — on pain of being sued. On top of that, they intend for the other Irish ISPs to follow suit — here’s a key line from the letter they sent to Blacknight MD Michele Neylon:

in the event of a positive response to this letter it is proposed to make practical arrangements with Blacknight of a like nature to those made with eircom.

If that comes to pass, this will be an appalling situation for Irish internet users, and we need to act to ensure it doesn’t happen. Digital Rights Ireland:

The net effect of this scheme, if it is allowed to go into effect, will be to impose an internet death penalty on two groups. On users, who will be cut off on the allegation of a private body, with no court involvement, and on websites, which could be blocked to Irish users based on a court hearing where only one side is heard.

Pace Mulley:

So first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book?

Digital Rights Ireland have posted an excellent document detailing the following plan of action for Irish internet users concerned about this:

• Contact your ISP and let them know that this is a key issue for you, as their customer.

• Join up with your fellow netizens. Subscribe to the Blackout Ireland blog. Follow the #blackoutirl hashtag on Twitter. Join the Blackout Ireland Facebook group. It looks likely that there’ll be a week-long blackout campaign starting next Thursday, March 5th.

• Contact politicians. This is likely to cause irreparable damage to the Irish internet, so our pols should be very worried. See the DRI post for details on getting in touch with Minister for Communications Eamonn Ryan.

New Zealand is running their own blackout campaign right now, so that may help our planning.

International readers — make no mistake, you’re next. IRMA in this case is acting as the local delegate of IFPI, which stated in 2007 that this was one of the 3 technical options for ISPs to control piracy:

Here’s some other interesting coverage:

Fantastic interview with BitBuzz CEO Alex French:

If ISPs, including Eircom, agree not to oppose blocking access to The Pirate Bay and other similar websites, is this not an agreement to web censorship? “I don’t think there is any other way to interpret it,” said French.

“They are essentially agreeing to censor certain websites at the behest of the recording industry, without these websites ever having necessarily shown to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland. I would have a huge concern over what other websites may be blocked and what other industries will pile in now that the precedent has been set.”

Some sample letters:

• letters to IRMA, and to Minister Eamon Ryan from Paul McCarthy

• A sample letter to your ISP from Charles Julienne

And further discussion — here’s a massive boards.ie discussion thread, now closed in favour of this newer thread.

Update: here’s the letter I sent to the Minister, if you’re curious or need inspiration.

Tags: blackoutirl, eircom, filesharing, grassroots, ifpi, internet, ireland, irma, isps, pirate-bay, politics

Wow. The IFPI’s strategy of “divide and conquer” by taking individual ISPs to court to force them to institute a 3 strikes policy, as successfully deployed against Eircom this week, is possibly marginally better than this insane obsolete-business-model handout proposed by the UK government in their Digital Britain report:

Lord Carter of Barnes, the Communications Minister, will propose the creation of a quango, paid for by a charge that could amount to £20 a year per broadband connection.

The agency would act as a broker between music and film companies and internet service providers (ISPs). It would provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies if they obtained a court order. It would be paid for by a levy on ISPs, who inevitably would pass the cost on to consumers.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “A new quango and additional taxes seem a bizarre way to stimulate investment in the digital economy. We have a communications regulator; why, when times are tough, should business have to fund another one?”

Well said. An incredibly bad idea.

By the way, I’ve noticed some misconceptions about the Eircom settlement. Telcos selling Eircom bitstream DSL (ie. the 2MB or 3MB DSL packages) are immune right now.

They are, however, next on the music industry’s hit-list, reportedly…

Tags: copyright, filesharing, ifpi, labour, piracy, quangos, uk

Eircom has been forced to implement “3 strikes and you’re out”, according to Adrian Weckler:

If the music labels come to it with IP addresses that they have identified as illegal file-sharers, Eircom will, in its own words:

“1) inform its broadband subscribers that the subscribers IP address has been detected infringing copyright and

“2) warn the subscriber that unless the infringement ceases the subscriber will be disconnected and

“3) in default of compliance by the subscriber with the warning it will disconnect the subscriber.”

My thoughts — it’s technically better than installing Audible Magic appliances to filter all outbound and inbound traffic, at least.

However, there’s no indication of the degree to which Eircom will verify the “proof” provided by the music labels, or that there’s any penalty for the labels when they accuse your laser printer of filesharing. I foresee a lot of false positives.

Update: LINX reports that the investigative company used will be Dtecnet, a ‘company that identifies copyright infringers by participating in P2P file-sharing networks’. TorrentFreak says:

DtecNet [...] stems from the anti-piracy lobby group Antipiratgruppen, which represents the music and movie industry in Denmark. There are more direct ties to the music industry though. Kristian Lakkegaard, one of DtecNet’s employees, used to work for the RIAA’s global partner, IFPI. [...]

Just like most (if not all) anti-piracy outfits, they simply work from a list of titles their client wishes to protect and then hunts through known file-sharing networks to find them, in order to track the IP addresses of alleged infringers.

Their software appears as a normal client in, for example, BitTorrent swarms, while collecting IP addresses, file names and the unique hash values associated with the files. All this information is filtered in order to present the allegations to the appropriate ISP, in order that they can send off a letter admonishing their own customer, in line with their commitments under the MoU.

[...] it will be a big surprise if [Dtecnet's evidence is] of a greater ‘quality’ than the data provided by MediaSentry.

More coverage of the issues raised by the RIAA’s international lobbying for the 3-strikes penalty:

• TorrentFreak: New Zealand First to Adopt 3-Strikes Law for Pirates
• TorrentFreak: Canadian MP: Three Strikes Law is Idiotic
• Top US Internet Providers Cool to RIAA 3-Strikes Plan
• UK rules out ‘3 strikes’
• Warning to all copyright enforcers: Three strikes and you’re out

Tags: 3-strikes, eircom, filesharing, piracy, riaa

RTE reports that 4 record companies, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music, have brought a High Court action to compel Eircom — Ireland’s largest ISP — to prevent its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music:

Willie Kavanagh, Managing Director of EMI Ireland and chairman of IRMA, said because of illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry was experiencing a “dramatic and accelerating decline” in income. He said sales in the Irish market dropped 30% in the six years up to 2007.

EMI and the other companies are challenging Eircom’s refusal to use filtering technology or other measures to voluntarily block or filter illegally downloaded material. Last October Eircom told the companies it was not in a position to use the filtering software.

(I wonder if those dropping sales in the Irish market comprise only CDs sold by Irish shops? 2001 to 2007 is also the time period when physical sales have given way to online shopping on a gigantic scale, especially for music.)

The Irish Times coverage includes another interesting factoid, which appears in a lot of press regarding this case:

Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal download, there are 20 illegal ones.

A little research reveals that that figure comes from the IFPI Digital Music Report 2008. I’d have a totally different take on it, however. In my opinion, the figure is probably correct, but not for the reasons the IFPI want them to be. There are a number of factors:

• it’s bloody hard to buy legit MP3s online. You can buy all sorts of shitty DRM-laden formats, or rent access to files that “expire”, or buy MP3s in certain jurisdictions but not in others, or on certain platforms. So this is the main reason, in my opinion, why legit music downloads are a lot lower than they could be – because it’s tricky to get a legit download!

  By contrast it’s a lot easier to log in to a filesharing service and download high-quality, DRM-free MP3s. Consumers have indicated that DRM frustrations drive them to filesharing sites, and no less than the Executive Vice President of the MPAA recognises this. (It looks like the IFPI dispute this, however.)

• people, given the opportunity, tend to download free music, whether or not they plan to listen to it. It could be called the “radio effect”; they might listen to it, or they might not, there’s no pressure. If they have to pay for it, however, they’ll only download the stuff they really want. I definitely noticed this when the legal download site EMusic switched from an “all you can eat” model to a certain number of files per month; I immediately stopped downloading tunes speculatively, and restricted myself just to the ones I had already decided I wanted.

• on BitTorrent filesharing sites, downloaders need to maintain high sharing ratios — so they download files just in order to re-upload them, regardless of whether they want them or not. (so I’m told. ;)

There’s more commentary on the 20-to-1 figure here.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 also notes:

“2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it becomes reality”

Governments are starting to accept that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should take a far bigger role in protecting music on the internet, but urgent action is needed to translate this into reality, a new report from the international music industry says today.

ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 points to French President Sarkozy’s November 2007 plan for ISP cooperation in fighting piracy as a groundbreaking example internationally. Momentum is also gathering in the UK, Sweden and Belgium. The report calls for legislative action by the European Union and other governments where existing discussions between the music industry and record companies fail to progress.

So it seems Ireland is the vanguard of an international effort by IFPI members to force ISPs to install filtering, worldwide. It seems the same happened in Belgium last year — and I reckon there’ll be similar cases elsewhere soon.

Either way, I doubt this will be good for Irish internet users.

(PS: while I’m talking about buying MP3s online — a quick plug for 7digital. Last time I used them, I had a pretty crappy experience, but the situation is a lot better nowadays. They now have a great website that works perfectly in Firefox on Linux; they sell brand new releases like the Hercules and Love Affair album as 320kbps DRM-free MP3s; they support PayPal payments; and downloads are fast and simple — right click, “Save As”. hooray!)

Some other blog coverage: Lex Ferenda with some details about the legal situation, and Jim Carroll.

Update: EMI Ireland seem to be singing from a different hymn-sheet than their head office… interesting.

Update 2: I’ve taken a look at the Copysense filtering technology, and how it can be evaded.

Tags: eircom, filesharing, ifpi, ireland, isps, law, mp3, music

A couple of years ago, various anti-spammers discussed how the credit-card payment processing companies were perfectly placed to disrupt the spam economy, by tracking down spammers through “poison pill” transactions. Nothing happened from that, though, and spam is now a bigger problem than ever.

Today, I hear that the Russian MP3 site, AllOfMP3, have lost their account with Visa to process credit-card payments.

In other words, it sounds like the banks are happy enough to close off filesharing, but couldn’t be bothered dealing with spam…

Tags: allofmp3, anti-spam, credit-cards, filesharing, payments, visa

Via Cory at Boing Boing, here’s a great Wired post-mortem on how all the corporate vested interests (including Apple!) turned a nice concept for a new, music-playing mobile phone, into a useless, DRM-hogtied, designed-by-committee turd.

That’s worth a read, in itself. However, what really blew my mind was this:

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia group, has bad news for the [music] labels. … He pushes a couple of buttons on the [phone's] keypad. Up pops Symella, a new peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary. As the name suggests, Symella is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia research center.

Symella doesn’t come installed on the N91; Vanjoki downloaded it from the university Web site. “Now I am connected to a number of peers,” he continues, “and I can just go and search for music or any other files. If I find some music I like and it’s 5 megabytes and I want to download it – the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of traffic.”

I had no idea the platform was that open, at this stage. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next…

Tags: apple, design-by-committee, filesharing, flop, itunes, motorola, mp3, music, p2p, phones, via:boingboing