Eircom, after initially holding out and maintaining its position so strongly, has now capitulated to the wishes of the music industry. It has settled with a group which runs 90% of Ireland’s music market, putting their wishes above the requirements of its own customer base, who of course, they didn’t consult about the move.

Thanks to Eircom entering into this entirely voluntary agreement, there is no need for them or the music industry to worry about any official intervention into the methods used for accusing and disconnecting subscribers. The music industry simply accuses alleged copyright infringers (via DtecNet, the… Continue reading

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years, but only recently has this become a hot topic. In collaboration with New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium, Google is helpng ‘the cause’ by launching Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a site that helps users determine if their ISP is interfering with BitTorrent traffic.

Among other tools, M-Lab will run the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute. Last year, tests performed with the Glasnost tool revealed that Comcast and Cox were actively interfering with the BitTorrent transfers of their subscribers.

The… Continue reading

Last year the Big Four record labels – EMI Records Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd, Universal Music Ltd and Warner Music Ltd – commenced legal proceedings against Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP. The four labels control 90% of Ireland’s music market and decided to pick on Eircom to do something about illicit file-sharing. They demanded that Eircom introduce filtering technology to crack down on pirates, but the ISP refused, hence the court case.

Quantifying its ‘losses’ in court, the four labels claimed illegal downloading costs the Irish music industry 13.8 million Euros every year, and since Eircom has 40 per cent… Continue reading

Cox is known to manage its network by slowing down BitTorrent users, or by making it impossible for them to share files with others.

Comcast was slapped by the FCC last year for a similarly unfair treatment of BitTorrent users, but Cox managed to get away relatively unscathed, even though it was using the same TCP RST packet forging techniques. Cox has no intention of stopping the traffic slowdowns in 2009, it will just use different methods.

In February, Cox will trial a brand new throttling scheme that aims to slow down so-called “non-time sensitive” traffic… Continue reading

As the file-sharing phenomenon continues unabated, more and more outfits are taking the opportunity to milk this cash-cow. Unfortunately, there are a growing number that operate in a legal gray area and/or prey on the likelihood that they will receive few complaints.

One business model in operation for some time now is the selling of otherwise free software to unsuspecting entrants to file-sharing and P2P. Unaware that everything they need can be legitimately acquired for free, they hand over payments for access to public sites such as Mininova or The Pirate Bay. Equally, they end up paying for uTorrent or other… Continue reading