The Current Trend of ISP Censorship

Ireland is the location of the latest example in the current trend of ISP censorship.

EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner had sued the Irish ISP, Eircom for "knowingly facilitating copyright infringement"(1) in failing to prevent illegal file sharing by its customers. Eircom should have been able to rely on Article 5 of the European Copyright Directive(2) which provides that ISP's can't be held liable for data transmissions, even if they infringe copyrights. Nevertheless, copyright holders were victorious when it was announced that Eicom had agreed to put in place a "three strike" system, similar to the one in operation in France, whereby persistent infringers will be removed.

IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association, has recently sent letters to other Irish ISPs demanding that they follow Eircom's lead and block access to "any website the music industry says is responsible for illegal music-swapping"(3). This lead the General Manager of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland, Paul Durrand, to state that IRMA's actions "could impact on user privacy, damage the development of new internet services and hurt Ireland's standing as an e-commerce hub"(4).

So far, the Irish Government has not acted as extremely as Australia's, which goes so far as to actually blacklist websites with the aid of filtering software(5). However, IRMA's actions could be taking the country one step closer to Oz.

Footnotes

(1) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/03/eircom_agrees_to_three_strikes_enforcement/
(2) http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32001L0029:EN:HTML
(3) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/irma_letter_to_isps_blacknight_solutions/
(4) http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/12506/comms/internet-body-labels-irma-legal-threat-spurious
(5) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/oz_internet_net/