File Sharing in Ireland

The High Court in Ireland has made its decision in a copyright infringement case brought by the major recording labels against several top ranking ISPs. The labels said that the service providers should be prohibited from facilitating subscriber access to The Pirate Bay and the Court agreed. UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Hutchison 3G and Telefonica O2 now have 30 days in which to block the infamous torrent site.

In court at the end of May the labels argued that as many as 200,000 Irish ISP users access TPB every month, causing losses to the labels of around 20 million euros a year. This situation, they said, required a court order to force the ISPs to take action within 30 days.

The application by IRMA was the first of its kind since Ireland's signing into law of the European Union (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2012. Described by some as Ireland's SOPA , the legislation was penned to make it easier for rightsholders to have sites such as The Pirate Bay blocked by court order. It appears to have done its job.

Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner have secured a court order against a decision that had brought the music labels' 3 strike anti-filesharing mechanism to its knees. The four music giants will now reinstate the system at ISP Eircom and put renewed effort into spreading the practice to other ISPs in Ireland.

Following a 2009 agreement between the labels of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) and Eircom, customers of the Irish ISP would find themselves warned should their file-sharing activities be tracked by rightsholders.

The so-called graduated response process would complete after a customer had received three warnings -- at this point their Internet would be cut off. But by October 2010 things we starting to go wrong. Due to a mix up, Eircom sent out around 300 warning letters to completely innocent subscribers.

The error meant that Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) got involved in the process. The immediate outcome was bad for the labels. In December the DPC ordered 3 strikes to be brought to a halt on privacy grounds.

This decision was later challenged by the Big Four labels of IRMA -- EMI Records, Sony Music, Universal and Warner -- who said that the DPC ruling effectively disabled their lawful agreement with Eircom.

At the Commercial Court, Mr Justice Peter Charleton ordered the Data Protection Commissioner's decision to be quashed, a ruling which gives IRMA and Eircom the green light to continue with warnings and disconnections.

The Irish government has now signed a SOPA-like law that will force ISPs to act as copyright cops and censor and block access to websites that the entertainment industry doesn't like. This happened despite widespread protests in Ireland against the bill.

The Irish Minister for Research and 'Innovation', Sean Sherlock, is claiming that the final version of the bill is much more limited than earlier proposals, and that it took guidance from recent EU Court of Justice rulings that say ISPs shouldn't have to be proactive about blocking. That still means that copyright holders can petition to force ISPs to block all access to various websites. No doubt the major record labels and studios will be doing just that very soon.

Sherlock, apparently realizing just how bad this looks to the citizenry, is trying to balance this announcement out by also saying that he's launching the next stage of the process to review copyright in Ireland, with the goal of supposedly removing barriers to innovation.