Dark Days Ahead for Irish Internet Users

[tarmle]

Just to catch you up. This year my ISP, Eircom.net, settled a dispute with the Irish Recorded Music Ass. (IRMA) who had taken them to court over illegal file sharing. The claim was that Eircom were complicit in the illegal activities of their users. the evidence against them included internal emails showing Eircom execs joking about copyright

Comments

[shockwave77598]

Go ahead and cancel and give you business and money to UPC. Sounds like the only thing IRMA had going for it was execs joking amongst themselves.

[tarmle]

Except that now I have to wait for the outcome of this IRMA vs. UPC case to find out if they're going to hold up any better than Eircom. And the problem there is that the Recording Industry isn't going to take the first 'no' as an answer and will keep coming back, possibly for years, until one of them runs out of money for lawyers. Guess which one that will be.

It's the same tactic used against people accused of file sharing in the US: offer the choice of a settlement or prosecution to people who cannot afford to defend themselves in court. Even if the accusations are false they'd end up bankrupting themselves just trying to make their case. This wouldn't work against telco's in the States because the ones that matter are too big to go after. But here in Ireland the biggest of them are relatively tiny and in real danger of running out of money before IRMA do.

As for the so-called evidence against Eircom, in the end it just didn't matter what they had because they settled out of court.

Blackout Ireland

[anonymous]

Contact pr@blackoutireland.com
We're an organisation dedicated to prevented Irish internet from being damaged by IRMA's actions.