[ILUG] Eircom surrenders

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Patrick O'Doherty wrote:
> is it just me or does the record labels knowing which users to send
> notices to seem a bit like a catch-22? They don't (or do they?) have the
> right to inspect all your traffic and determine that you are pirating
> material, so their determining that you have pirated material is an
> invasion of privacy and therefore invalid?
> 
> I could be (and probably am) wrong in saying this though.
>

By the initial reports, the legacy music industry will be using one of 
those  shady services that basically use malicious p2p peers to 
ascertain ip addresses participating in p2p download clouds of files 
they claim copyright on, and then giving [ip datetime file] tuples to 
eircom.  Eircom will presumably correlate that against their own 
connection records and issue the notices.   There are arguments that 
skirts privacy concerns - the legacy music industry is only using 
information the target volunteered by participating in the p2p cloud, 
and eircom is (probably) not identifying the target by name back to the 
music industry.  Obviously, _eircom_ still has identifying details of 
the targets, though, and maybe those would be later discoverable whether 
by eircom volunteering them like saps or by court order...  However, the 
legacy music industry _may_ have also exhausted the right to later 
further sue the targets for the infringements by agreeing to the plan, 
I'm currently not sure on that issue, might depend on details of the 
case (and I am not a lawyer!).

Shrug.   Obviously, most people on this list in particular are generally 
savvy enough to use different ports and vpns/encryption and blocklists 
(tracking the ips of known malicious pro-copyright peers) and whatnot if 
they're engaged in copyright infringing p2p activities*, but may be good 
time to educate your less techie friends on such matters.

* mind you, stuff actually worth having or sharing these days tends to 
be legally free anyway.