While neither of these rulings have a direct effect on how Irish law will be amended to handle copyright infringement they do say something about the role of service providers in identifying and censuring users who willingly share material without consent of the rightsholder.

As per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, both these decisions allow ISPs to claim a 'safe harbour' defence meaning they cannot be held accountable for the actions of users across their networks. However, while ISPs in Australis can now avoid censure, their European counterparts may have to work with rightsholders in rooting out rogue elements and handing over IP addresses with minimal evidence.

Right now in Ireland rightsholders have to take action against copyright infringement on a case-by-case basis, taking out injunctions against individuals with no promise that the Courts will uphold their claim. This is before factoring in the cost of hiring a third party to identify suspect IP addresses.

In Ireland rightsholder bodies like IRMA can provide ISPs with a list of infringing customers' IP addresses (sometimes compiled by a third party). In the case of eircom a 'three-strikes' rule could see service suspended but no other ISP in Ireland has adopted similar measures. If, say, a UPC or Magnet customer's IP address was identified it would require an order of discovery made through the Courts to have them identified before any further action could be taken.

If a streamlined process (as the Swedish case would point to) were to remove barriers to identifying customer IP addresses it could lead the way to a situation where legal sanction becomes cheap enough to pursue on a larger scale than is currently financially viable.

So the middleman gets off the hook the individual has to start over his/her back.