Irish ISP Blocks Pirate Bay

Bad news for Irish file sharers as Eircom, the country's largest ISP, has made good on the terms of its deal with rights holders and blocked access to the Pirate Bay.

This is of concern for two reasons: a) copyright holders clearly have an inordinately large amount of lobbying power that enables them to force an ISP to change its entire way of doing business, and b) ISP content filtering is creeping into Europe.

Source

Eircom Pirate Bay Blockade Takes Effect
(LINK)

Meanwhile, in Australia their ISP filtering regime may be coming to an end.

Source

Aussie firewall nears death
(LINK)

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/