Censoring/filtering via intermediate networks is a sledgehammer approach to the problem that infringes on far too many other civil rights to be in any way justifiable.

Let me proffer an analogy: this is akin to a national airport being told to refuse planes to/from certain foreign cities just because some travellers coming off these planes in the past had not declared goods or had drugs in their pockets. Except of course this is worse – this is a private organization calling the shots, not our elected government. Crazy.

Btw, have you read the letter sent to Michele Neylon (of Blacknight, an ISP, not a broadband service provider)? See http://blog.blacknight.com/irma-threatens-irish-isps.html

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what their overall strategy is here. Is it a ‘threaten everyone in the internet business and see what sticks’ strategy? Is this the global industry attacking Ireland as a test bed because they know our legislative/judiciary processes are out of date and hence a soft touch compared to our European neighbours? Or is it just pure greed on behalf of a local association? Does this law firm understand the nature of the technology infrastructure that they are threatening?

The victims of copyright infringement should target the sources of the infringement, not intermediates, be they ISPs or hosting providers.

Opposition would probably result in a trial, in which IRMA would seek to prove that the website was naughty and the website owner would seek to show it was not. Use of lawyers advised. Not cheap.

Obviously, the further away the website owner would be, the more difficult and/or unlikely s/he might be to bother to resist, but the right to do so would be exactly the same as an Irish-based owner.

Do you have any pointers on what process websites have to go through to oppose a request? Would it be prohibitively expensive and does this process accommodate websites that have no base on Ireland (or say the EU?)

@simon Digital Rights Ireland looks vaguely interesting but whoever runs it needs to be a bit more transparent about who they are, their charter etc before I’d consider supporting them.

Then, as now, they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the modern world. Ivory towers and all that.

“…Eircom will not oppose any court application, meaning that the orders will be automatically granted”

is not accurate.

The owners of the websites will have to be given notice of the applications, and even if they fail to oppose them, the court itself does have a discretion not to grant them.