IFPI Gets Its Own Way With Eircom

So it finally came to pass last week - Eircom, Ireland's largest ISP (and provider to all of Ireland's broadband resellers) has capitulated to the IFPI, IRMA (the Irish Recorded Music Association) and the big labels including EMI and Sony. They hardly stood much of a chance, and at least they tried. In fact, they didn't give in to every demand, namely the requirement to hand over details of customers found guilty of downloading copyrighted material to the record company legal eagles (boo). Instead, they will deal with the matter themselves, and apply a three-strikes rule: email warnings will be sent to those observed to be downloading such material and after a third and final warning their service will be terminated.

This sets something of a precedent* in Ireland, and it probably won't be long before the other ISPs follow (mostly because they all resell Eircom based services anyway). There are a few that may well slip under the radar, such as Digiweb, but the main targets will probably be UPC and Smart, especially since many heavy downloaders will now be scared away from Eircom and its ilk to one of these two ISPs. Especially since they offer higher speeds for lower costs (and greater caps, or in Smart's case, unlimited downloads).

Questions lie as to how copyrighted material will be traced through torrent sites - since by its very nature, distributed BitTorrent traffic is notoriously difficult to trace. It's decentralized, deregulated and buried deep underground. Demonoid were famously squeezed for a while, but they bounced back once they managed to find themselves a new home. The P2P file sharers are much easier to trace - and up to now most prosecutions have been made in this area. The talk of being able to trace the "fingerprint" of a file is interesting. If an mp3 comes from a CD rip - as most do - then how can it have a traceable "fingerprint" (in practical terms)? If I rip a track from a CD, I may use any one of three or four programs for this purpose that I have to hand, and I may use any bit rate I feel like. I might even use a less standard frequency. The point is that filenames can be changed. Filesizes will vary in any case, and hence so will MD5 hashes - the standard means of taking the "fingerprints" of any file. The only way I can see the likes of Sony tracing this traffic is to seed the files themselves - which is essentially entrapment - and hope that the flies like the sound of their flypaper.

Perhaps someone out there can suggest some other means by which this "fingerprinting" may be achieved. One that's practical and workable. No science fiction please :)

*The reason I suggested that it's something of a precedent is because UTV Clicksilver broadband operated a "fair usage" policy right from the start, and they've been offering broadband in Ireland for years now. This policy stated that torrent, file sharing and P2P traffic would be monitored and that heavy users would have their bandwidth squeezed, so that other light to moderate users did not suffer. Repeat offenders would be warned, and once a third and final warning was ignored, their accounts would be suspended. There were reports of users having their accounts suspended for the rest of the month, just as if they had exceeded their download cap, and those that were reckless enough to offend again once their accounts were resumed were banned. There was no blacklisting as far as I am aware, I would think that it would have been in breach of the privacy laws to go that far.
The point is that this has been tried before in this country by an ISP - they weren't under pressure from the music industry, but were just trying to be fair to all their users and try to manage contention. Nice in theory. I was with them for nearly 3 years, and never once received a warning - obviously because I never leeched or seeded torrents on a regular basis ;-)

References:
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-capitulates-to-ifpi-agrees-to-disconnect-pirates-090128/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/16833.cfm
http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/2009/01/28/eircom-and-irish-record-labels-settle-action/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15522.cfm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7854494.stm