Irish Judge Approves Three Strikes Disconnection Policy

The Irish High Court has given the go-ahead for Internet service providers to operate a “three strikes” disconnection policy, to deal with illegal file-sharers.

The decision follows the High Court’s scrutiny of an agreement between Ireland’s largest ISP Eircom and the four major record labels: EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and Universal. Under the terms of the deal, Eircom agreed to use software such as “DetectNet” to identify copyright-infringers by their IP addresses. It would then write twice to the bill payer to inform them that copyright infringement had taken place, before cutting off their Internet access if infringement occurred on a third occasion.

Following the agreement last year, the Data Protection Commissioner expressed concern that Eircom would be interfering with basic rights if it disconnected households or businesses, prompting the High Court to conduct a further investigation.

Not a breach of data protection

Mr Justice Peter Charleton ruled that the agreement did not break data protection laws because the record labels had “no interest at all in using this process to find out who the copyright infringers are”, but rather they were “interested in having the protocol work so that the plague of copyright infringement may be undermined”.

Charleton went on to defend the rights of copyright owners, describing the right to be identified with and to exploit one’s own original creative endeavour as a “human right” and a “universal entitlement”.

“Were the artist not entitled to exploit her or his creation by preventing others from copying it without permission … then the fruits of moments of inspiration worked out through weeks of endeavour and representing, sometimes, the distillation of some fundamental experience of life would bring no reward,” Charleton said.

“The Internet is only a means of communication. It has not rewritten the legal rules of each nation through which it passes. It is not an amorphous extraterrestrial body with an entitlement to norms that run counter to the fundamental principles of human rights,” he added. “Among younger people, so much has the habit grown up of downloading copyright material from the Internet that a claim of entitlement seems to have arisen to have what is not theirs for free.”

Digital Economy Act passed in UK

The news follows the recent passing of the Digital Economy Act into British law, after it received Royal Assent from the Queen at the start of April. The Act was largely welcomed by the music industry and the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), but critics including some MPs and ISPs criticised the government’s decision to push the Act through as part of the ‘wash-up’ ahead of the General Election.

Today the European Commission criticised content providers and governments for failing to offer European consumers legal channels to download music. In a video conference with EU Telecoms and Information Society Ministers, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said that the failure to agree on common standards and platforms across Europe was directly contributing to illegal file-sharing.

Last month the Crown Prosecution Service was forced to drop its charges against a teenage boy charged with illegally distributing copyrighted material, after it failed to trace the digital watermarks of the copyrighted material back to the source. Matthew Wyatt’s lawyers claimed that he was not responsible for uploading the copyrighted material, but found the music files on a publicly accessible music site and moved them onto popular BitTorrent file-sharing website Oink.