today, ireland became the RIAA's bitch

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/29/1249252

  Quote

"In what has been billed as a world first, four music companies and Irish ISP Eircom have agreed to work together to end illegal music downloading. The Irish branches of the record companies (EMI Records Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd, Universal Music Ltd and Warner Music Ltd.) brought a High Court action against Eircom last March which has resulted in this settlement after eight days of trial. Eircom will be implementing a three-step process — informing a subscriber that their IP address has been detected infringing copyright; warning the subscriber that if they do not stop they will be disconnected; and finally disconnecting the user if they fail to heed the warning. Which technology they will be using to spy on their customers is currently unknown. EMI and the other record companies have recommended US-based Audible Magic, which (among other things) claims to block copyright violating web content from sites like Youtube and MySpace. However, digital surveillance is nothing new in Ireland and Eircom may have already tested and implemented the necessary technologies."

what i'm interested in is how the overpaid, clueless, charisma-less wankers who run my country intend to technically implement this. china-style? i fucking doubt it.

i left eircom about a year ago for a cable ISP. they are semi-state owned, and they make BT or NTL look like a professional organisation.

what is interesting is that this morning i heard a dude on the radio make the point that there are kids today who have never heard anything in full frequency range audio. all they know is shitty compressed (in either sense of the word, actually) audio. witness chavs on the bus listening to the latest R&B hit in 96kbps mono audio from their phone on the bus. ruining my fuckin morning in the process.

that's kind of sad. what will music sound like in 50 years if this trend continues?

You have downloaded more than 1TB of music in your life and you think you can get away with it? Eat this! :angry:

So they get your IP address...they send you an email and then they disconnect you if you do not heed the warning. They lose even more money this way surely. And even if they tried to persecute you their job get immesurably more complicated and expensive.

Sounds pretty irish to me.

  Etch said:

So they get your IP address...they send you an email and then they disconnect you if you do not heed the warning. They lose even more money this way surely. And even if they tried to persecute you their job get immesurably more complicated and expensive.

 

Sounds pretty irish to me.

Yes the irish are well known for being complicated and expensive.

believe me, the stupidity, ignorance, and obliviousness to real-world implementation of technical concepts of this country's government knows no bounds

what i am more worried about is the precedent this sets

they recently tried this in the states, and most smaller ISPs told em to fuck off - it is in essence requesting the ISP to act as an unpaid lawyer for the *IAA in question. i think comcast and some other biggie have agreed to implement similar shit though.

Hey get this. My step dad became Gary Barlow in the official Take That Tribute Band today.

No liez

  Etch said:

Sounds pretty irish to me.

Irish would be if they showed up at your house drunk, called you a cunt, and punched you in the mouth...

nah dude, irish used to be... well, if you're not hurting anyone, carry on

hey, let's ring in sick tomorrow and go to the pub. it is a wednesday after all

this is very un-irish.

It's 9 a.m. and I'm soulseeking on eircom. This is after all the land of "TV licenses" and where the government spent 20 million on an electronic voting system that never even saw the light of day.

Ireland, I'm calling your bluff.

Also, the economy here is fuct. heard a great joke on the radio today: What's the difference between Ireland and Iceland?

fuck the music business. I hope it dies a horrible death and all record execs and a & r men end up on the dole or committing suicide. fucking most stupid idea ever - building a profit based business around an art form. wankers. fuck them all.

  kaini said:

that's kind of sad. what will music sound like in 50 years if this trend continues?

internet will improve, harddrives will get bigger. 192kbps mp3s will just become a joke, same way downloading movies was once impossible back when videos really streamed in really low quality.

there's an australian isp that's apperantly doing the same thing over here, saying they'll disconnect you if caught doing cheeky pirating on the internet. dunno how it's going though. i know people who use their internet and continue downloading this and tha.t

  BCM said:

fuck the music business. I hope it dies a horrible death and all record execs and a & r men end up on the dole or committing suicide. fucking most stupid idea ever - building a profit based business around an art form. wankers. fuck them all.

somebody else's art as well. i'm happy to pay for music if it's small online stuff where i know how much money is going to the artist, but supporting the industry, which is just silly+pointless.

  pigster said:

  BCM said:

fuck the music business. I hope it dies a horrible death and all record execs and a & r men end up on the dole or committing suicide. fucking most stupid idea ever - building a profit based business around an art form. wankers. fuck them all.

 

somebody else's art as well. i'm happy to pay for music if it's small online stuff where i know how much money is going to the artist, but supporting the industry, which is just silly+pointless.

They think of it in the bail out sense: give money to the corporations and it should trickle down to the commoners. They're saying if you want to support artists, you should support the industry first, which is ridiculous.

how can these organizations have that much pull and lobby shit like this through. however seeing how some things work (or don't work) in ireland, i am sure it will take a long time to implement or it will be a total disaster and they are going to scrap it after they wasted a couple of millions on it.

hey guys, I think we should make an online protest!

...

Actually I recently recieved a letter from my cable provider telling me they logged my IP due to transferring copyright material (it was a promo video I made...) http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1015563603763

That's my first warning... but they make no effort to remove the "offending" content (no instructions in the letter either, just a "warning")... seems they're just mad about transferring the content.

  kaini said:

that's kind of sad. what will music sound like in 50 years if this trend continues?

Crystal Castles

I'd be curious to know how they track files and determine if they are copyrighted material. The file name? The tags? The file data itself. Surely people would figure out a way around this eventually.

wait, so what does this have to do with the IRA?

after your third warning they come round and execute you

IRA ISP

Wouldn't encrypted torrents and proxy systems like Tor get round this fairly easily anyway?

maybe. or maybe the riaa will destroy us all.

proxies would indeed get around this. you should start a proxies company.

the problems is that when you connect to a torrent you can see all the other IPs sucking and spitting that torrent. the reverse means eircom can see that you're connected.

there are cases when ISPs / RIAA only send you warnings when they can gain some of that torrent by connecting to your computer. in that case you can use peerguardian which disallows certain IPs, namely ones from the RIAA and affiliate organisations, connecting to your computer.

you of course need to know they only send you a warning if they can connection to you, not jst if they can see your IP address downloading, though. but yeah, using a proxy to a non irish ISP woud be the best.

or just not use eircom.