Irish ISP Wins Major Legal Victory Against Record Companies

An anonymous reader writes "The High Court in Dublin ruled today that there was no precedent in Irish law to force ISPs to identify and disconnect people accused of illegally downloading copyrighted files. The court case was spurred by objections to the recording industry's three-strikes system from Irish internet provider UPC. Earlier this year, Eircom, one of Ireland's other large ISPs, gave in and implemented the system, as we discussed previously. This resulted in many of the more 'technical' users leaving that ISP in droves. Nice to see an ISP willing to take a stand."

Now why is it

[Moryath]

that the only sane people seem to be in other countries? In the US, the normal people get trodden on all over the place, the idea of a "choice" of ISP is a joke, and despite the prohibition on ex post facto laws, the Supreme Court ruled that a bought-off Congress could keep extending "copyright term" ad infinitum - even setting it to a "million bajillion" years if they felt like it.

 

economics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats special about record companies anyhow............shouldn't they be poor now? I haven't seen records anywhere in years.

As a UPC customer

[Gopher971]

I'm delighted with the stand they are taking. I was previously with Eircom and was one of the thousands who left when they caved into IMRO. While I woldn't case myself as purer than pure, I do frequently download iso's for various Linux distributions.

As an aside, I've found UPC to be a much superior ISP, with great customer service, not like the bad old days of NTL.

Re:Economics

[erroneus]

It's all a matter of where the incentive lies. In this case, the ISP probably doesn't get any money from the recording industry at all so they have no incentive to support their interests.

My first reaction was "well, technical users probably use their support services a LOT less often and so cost them less in terms of support and so the loss of their tech savvy customers is a big loss in terms of support costs per customer." That should factor into additional incentives to care about their tech savvy users but certainly not enough by itself.

Oh sure, let the market decide...

[HeckRuler]

The problem with your assumption is that Eirecom is going to lose money off of this. Now, I'm not sure how it works in Ireland, but if this exact scenario went down in the USA, Eirecom would be congradulating themselves as they found a way to shluff off all the "band-width hogs". You know, those 'technical users' that actually use the connection they purchase. ISPs here make bank on mom and pop who check their email.