Easily the biggest story of the past week has been the agreement between eircom and the ‘big four’ (Warner Bros, UNiversal, Sony BMG, EMI) record labels on how to handle the issue of music piracy. Under the terms of the out of court settlement record labels will have the right to identify serial content uploaders – people who make material available without permission of the copyright holder – and report them to eircom. In turn eircom will operate a”three strikes and you’re out” punitive model.
First time offences will be greeted with a warning, second time warrants a suspension of service and a third offence will be faced with discontinuation of service.
The deal, the first of its kind in the world represents an important move away from the recording industry targeting individuals and putting the onus on service providers to police their networks – an approach advicated by U2 manager Paul McGuinness.
Reaction to the decision has been swift and generally negative from the user base and even some quarters in the telco sector. According to ALTO (Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators), a body whose membership includes BT, Magnet, Cable & Wireless, Chorus and Smart Telecom, the move is draconian and represents an unnecessary intrusion on user privacy. Few could argue with that.
But let’s play devil’s advocate for a bit. Peer-to-peer sharing currently takes up half the entire bandwidth of the Internet, that means that roughly half of online activity is the unauthorised sharing of copyrighted material. Many users are consistently filling hard drives full of music (and movies) without a second thought, eating into industry margins and compromising the number and quality of future productions. If it happened in retail it would be labelled shoplifting yet because no physical format is involved it’s somehow easier to achieve the same result: getting something for nothing at the expense of the artist. Put it that way and of course you’d want to do something about it.
Then look at it from eircom’s side. As a portal eircom.net relies on content from numerous sources, record labels among them. If healthy relations, and a potential revenue stream through digital sales benefit the company then why wouldn’t you want to put a clampdown in place on users who could also put a dint in your own profits.
Do the numbers and from a client facing perspective it’s a no brainer.
On the flipside, and this is where it gets messy, your service is only as successful as the user base lets it be. One strand of eircom’s approach is the use of eircom.net as a content portal, making subscriptions to their own services particularly attractive. Putting user information within the reach of a third party is appalling PR and will not help their marketing department attract new customers one bit.
So in short, as eircom cosy up to the music industry the user base will look towards the competition to preserve their surfing habits.
Think of it this way, if I make a phone call and use some choice language it hardly warrants a complaint from the league of decency and threat of disconnection.
When third parties are having a say in how service providers do business then something is seriously awry. Nobody should lose their connection for downloading Jeremy Clarkson’s Top 100 Driving Classics. So who’s going to blink first?
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers