Ireland Leads the Way in Internet Filtering
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 by Harry LewisIreland is implementing a very aggressive Internet filtering scheme. The nation’s largest ISP, Eircom, will be getting the IP addresses of alleged offenders from Irma, the Irish Recorded Music Association. Once Eircom has identified the owner of the account associated with the IP address, it will initiate an increasingly threatening contacts. As the BBC News explains,
Initially they will be sent a letter and a follow-up phone call from a new unit set up by Eircom to deal with the issue. They may also get a pop-up warning on their screen.
If they are identified a third time they will have their service withdrawn for a week and, if a fourth infringement occurs, will be cut off for a year.
What about the EU’s rejection of three-strikes laws as human rights violations? Nonsense, says the head of Irma, Dick Doyle. They have it backwards.
“The European Parliament has been talking about internet access as a basic human right. It absolutely is not. Intellectual property protection is a right.”
Look forward to other countries following suit, including our own, if the AntiCounterfeiting Trade Agreement is as rumored.
Sherry Turkle gave a talk at Harvard recently, not about any of these issues, in which she spoke movingly of her immigrant mother telling her that the great thing about America is that the government can’t open your mail. In the US, if a music CD arrived in our home via the postal service, the government couldn’t open the envelope to check it, without a warrant based on probable cause. Stay tuned for the rules for the Internet to be exactly the opposite.
June 3rd, 2010 at 4:01 pm
[…] has become the first country to implement very aggressive “internet filtering” policies. Under this scheme, Eircom—the largest ISP in Ireland—receives a list of IP […]