As it is evident to most people file sharing and illegal downloading are not going to go away. The only thing that can be done is to minimise it by providing an alternative service that can compete with it. However the media industry refuses to acknowledge this and try and develop a new business model to compete with it. One of the biggest displays of ignorance was IRMA forcing Eircom to block the Pirate Bay website. It is the most pointless thing I’d ever heard of and I am extremely annoyed at Eircom for allowing it to happen. I hope to address two points in this post the being why it was pointless for the IRMA to request a block on just the pirate bay. and the second is why I am so annoyed at Eircom for allowing it to happen.
The reason that this block is so pointless is the same way that the napster situation in the late nineties early noughties was. unless every ISP agrees to block every site suspected of facilitating copyright infringement then banning just one or a selection of these sites is pointless. People are just going to switch to another site or service. Listening to an interview with an IRMA representative on the radio a few weeks ago it came across to me as though he genuinely believed that illegal downloading by Eircom customers was genuinely going to be stopped by this ban.
I don’t think that these people realise how the internet works, it goes beyond one I.P address, URL or set of servers. The pirate bay could very easily just copy everything across to a new set of servers with a new name and then the IRMA would be back to square one. It really is mind boggling. Being a child of the internet generation so to speak I am amazed at the fear of change exhibited by the big media companies. Being honest I see record companies influence diluting in favour of artists direct marketing to fans through services such as MySpace, iTunes and Facebook. Record sales were falling before napster and any of this became a topical issue. There’s a lot that could be said about how the napster incident was handled on both sides and being honest I don’t know enough about the subject to comment one way or the other about what happened. iTunes was released a few months later which I suppose could be seen as a happy compromise. (I’m a fan of iTunes btw).
I suppose now would be a good time to move onto my second point. I can’t understand why Eircom would allow this to happen. As an ISP (Internet Service Provider) they shouldn’t be censoring anything. It is not the duty of the ISP to filter content. What’s worse about this is that it has set a precedent now in Irish law. It is a bad precedent since it was all decided before it went before the court. The fact that it was stated in the Judges comments at the end of the trial maybe a saving grace for ISP’s that do not back down from the record companies. UPC and Esat BT have stated that they will not follow in Eircom’s foot steps. There is no legal condition in this country to force ISP’s to monitor their customers usage of broadband services. What it really boils down to is that Eircom backed down when threatened with legal action. Hopefully UPC and Esat BT which are larger companies and owned in turn by bigger multinationals will not.
