Eircom and Music Labels Go After Pirates

Just read that Eircom and the music industry gang (Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal) have come to an agreement on illlegal downloading of music in Ireland.

Firstly, I didn’t realise that, in the grand scheme of things, Ireland was on the radar of these guys, or that out of a population of 4.x million, that we had that many people illegally downloading music.

Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) seemed to be the catalyst and driving force for getting the ball rolling, in an effort to protect Irish Artists rights. IRMA’s figures show a drop of about 50 million euro in music sales in Ireland in 2007, which they attribute to piracy. (Could this just be iTunes?)

The solution provider / P2P tracker that Eircom will be rolling out is called DetecNet ,

More on the story here:

http://siliconrepublic.com/news/article/12181/new-media/big-four-music-labels-and-eircom-in-landmark-piracy-settlement

and then I read about the guys at Google releasing a tool that would detect services like DetectNet running on your ISP.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/new-google-tool.html

Glasnost, is part of the suite of tools released that checks your internet connection for any issues.

For years, ISPs have been notoriously shady about what they’re throttling or blocking. The industry needs a healthy dose of transparency. Right now, we’re just a bunch of pissed-off users complaining about our Skype calls getting dropped and our YouTube videos sputtering to a halt. But when it comes to placing blame, most of us are in the dark.

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I suppose this will be more of the same, back and forth.

Perhaps TIGA/IGDA and similar games-industry bodies should start looking at following suit, with respect to ISP agreements for users pulling down PC game ISO’s…

B.