It’s Halfway through Blackout Ireland’s week of action. There’s lots you can do to keep the Irish web uncensored.
March 8
Sunday Update
We’re now halfway through our Blackout Week protest to raise awareness about the recent deal between Eircom and the record labels, and its implications for Irish internet users.
We have asked the Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, to examine the recent settlement and look at ways to strengthen legislation to protect both ISPs and internet consumers.
The protest has been covered in The Irish Times and Ars Techica, and we have received the support of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.
Danny O’Brien from the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) makes a strong case for why the other ISPs should stand with their customers, and, in an article in the Irish Times, lambasts IRMA for their short-sighted thuggery.
Blackout Ireland spokesperson Aubrey Robinson has appeared on the RedFM’s Victor Barry Show,TodayFM’s The Last Word, iRadio and PhoenixFM.
An official Blackout Ireland Facebook page has been setup here. In Twitter, you can follow @BlackoutIreland.
Several questions are being asked in relation to the protest, for example:
In protesting what the record companies are doing, are you not encouraging piracy?
We have been clear from the outset that we do not condone piracy and believe that music labels have every right to be fairly compensated.
What we oppose is the music industry’s efforts to police the internet and have users disconnected extrajudicially. We believe these actions must be opposed so that the industry is forced to look at alternative ways to make an income.
There is no way to eliminate piracy completely. The solution for the record companies is to minimise it by offering affordable alternatives that make sense to how people use the internet.
New technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing are here to stay. These technologies will continue to evolve and music distribution will become increasingly hard to control. The music industry cannot possibly maintain the degree of control they once had over distribution, and must instead look at ways to license music in a similar way to how they license to radio stations.
The success of iTunes proves that people are willing to pay for music so long as it’s affordable and works intuitively with how they consume media.
Our task is to successfully oppose the music industry’s current line of attack and force them to look at alternatives.
For more on alternatives, visit EFF and the Green Party Free Alliance.
Surely the ISPs need to monitor their traffic for serious offences like child pornography and report it to the authorities?
Our position is that internet policing should be done by police authorities following due process and that sentencing must happen in the courts.
ISPs do not have the means to monitor or filter data. Setting up this technology would be expensive and would lead to a considerable increase in charges for internet consumers.
Moreover, if the ISPs become legally responsible for monitoring the data, they would become responsible for any criminal activity that took place on their network. This would force them to remove anything that could potentially lead to a lawsuit, resulting in a highly filtered and restricted internet.
We feel strongly that ISPs must remain protected as mere conduits of data, and would oppose any change to that in legislation.
More questions relating to Blackout Ireland are covered here.
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