Ireland

Took office in Ireland is a very bad climate for P2P world, even the music industry lobbyists, who have reported great success when one of the largest Irish ISP Eircom, has given up fighting in court and agreed to disconnect their customers, guilty of violation of copyright, now they want the ISP block all file-sharing sites starting with the Pirate Bay.

The funny thing is that at least in the case of the Italian block Pirate Bay, ISPs had to obey an order of the Finance Police, even if the court of review has decided to cancel the block, but there is no provision in Ireland lawsuit against Pirate Bay. It is, in fact, of private agreements between ISPs and the music industry and the politicians, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands, not wanting to be involved in the story that would put against public opinion.

So the situation is that Eircom will block any site which will be reported dall'Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) and will accept any blacklisted at the same time music lobbies have given notice to the other ISPs within seven days to accept the same deal, otherwise they will be mentioned court. Of course the ISPs do not agree and seek protection. You do not really know who will be able to contact, since as said that the political forces are conspicuous by their absence, while virtually every form of freedom is eliminated from the internet.

And if the site has a lot of material free from the constraints imposed by the copyright will be blocked too, just an infringement notice in relation to the site. This will also say that in Ireland no artist can expose its content using peer-to-peer technology as likely then that the site is disconnected, thereby it destroys any possibility for an artist to make known his deeds outside the official channels.

I really hope that public opinion in Ireland react to these charges. If Eircom, in fact, might begin to see many of its users dissolve the contract and move to other ISPs that have not accepted the dictates of IRM, ie if all this will bring a huge economic damage, we must see whether it will continue to blindly obey taxation of music lobbies.