Disconnecting online pirates

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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While South Africans have only recently begun enjoying more affordable uncapped broadband, ISPs abroad have started reacting to the use of such a service to illegally distribute copyrighted material. 

Comcast, a US ISP, tried to deprioritise (or shape) the traffic generated by peer-to-peer networks, instigating a debate around net-neutrality in the United States.

In 2009 France’s top constitutional court approved a plan to cut off Internet access to those who are found to repeatedly be in violation of copyright law despite the European Parliament voting against such laws being implemented in member states earlier that year.

The latest move in the P2P battle comes from Ireland. The Irish Times reports that Eircom, a large telecommunications provider in Ireland with 750,000 broadband users, will begin a process that will lead to the suspension of broadband services of customers that are found to be illegally sharing music online. They state that Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of “graduated response” is being put in place.

Eircom agreed to establish the system in an out-of-court settlement in 2009 with the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma), whose members include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.

Execution of the plan comes after it was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner and it was ruled in the High Court that the IP address of a broadband subscriber doesn’t constitute personal information.

Customers found to be infringing on copyright laws will first be phoned by Eircom to establish whether they are aware of the illegal activity on their network. 

These developments, along with those rulings internationally that hold BitTorrent trackers responsible for the copyright infringement though they only track metadata and facilitate connections between peers, makes one wonder whether there’ll be a free and open Internet left by the time most South Africans have access to cheap, unshaped bandwidth.

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