Tag Archives: Ireland’s Sopa

A ‘Concerned Internet User’ writes:

So Sean Sherlock is looking for people to contact the Irish Internet Association as they will ‘moderate an online consultation‘ about the ‘Irish Sopa’ Statutory Instrument (which became law last night).

The IIA has two members of staff. One is the association’s president, the other is the events organiser.

The president, Joan Mulvihill (above) is on the Fine Gael executive council. and is on record as stating that her association cannot take a stance as they represent content creators and businesses that operate using the internet.

Have a look at today’s Tweets on the official IIA account and Joan’s own.

Wouldn’t hold out much hope for impartiality there.

 

Earlier: The Best Irish Sopa Denunciation You’ll Read Today

Good Morning, Sean

 

Tech entrepreneur Joe Drumgoole, of Cloudsplit writes:

Un.Fucking.Believable.

SOPA Ireland got passed into law [last night] despite the protests of 80,000 people. I ask you, what do we have to do to move the needle for the venal deadbeats that have brought this country to its knees? These people want to hand it over piecemeal to every transnational corporation who comes looks looking for a piece of the action.

If democracy can’t work like this how is it supposed to work?

We spent the last 50 years eradicating the anti-democratic forces that turned Northern Ireland into a battlefield only to find the enemy has always been amongst us. The Trilateral Commission in 1973 bemoaned “The Crisis of Democracy” surrounding the protests associated with the Vietnam War. They would have smiled benevolently on our current government’s ability to blithely ignore the concerns of the electorate in order to serve the “the needs of the market” i.e. the music industry who put a gun to its head after the Eircom three strikes ruling was overturned.

We apparently “must legislate” because the EMI told us so.

What should we do? What can we do? Our government has slapped us on the arse and told us to go to bed.

If as a democratic state we no longer have democracy then the alternatives are bleak indeed.

Via (with Joe’s permission) The Shame Of Sopa Ireland (Copacetic)

Image by John Ward via Sean Sherlock’s Facebook wall.

Of course, the end result is that the government appears to be trying to move in two different directions at once. On the one hand, it’s catering to the legacy entertainment industry interests and hindering the internet as the platform that enables new business models… while at the same time paying lip service to how it has to increase such innovation. Here’s a tip: the first thing towards increasing innovation in business models online is not putting misplaced liability on service providers, not setting up a censorship regime, and not removing the incentives for the entertainment industry to actually embrace innovative business models.

Ireland Signs Controversial ‘Irish SOPA’ Into Law; Kicks Off New Censorship Regime (Techdirt)

Most importantly, it is a disgraceful decision, not because an unprecedented 80,419 people mobilised in the space of a few days and told Ministers Bruton and Sherlock that they were wrong to take this action.

It is a shameful decision because the Government knows that those 80,419 people were right, and have done the wrong thing anyway.

Response To Signing Of Sopa (StopSopaIreland)

For better or for worse, this is now known at home and abroad as “Ireland’s SOPA”. SOPA was despised among big tech multinationals in the US, who are Ireland’s main hope for inward investment at the moment. Last night [Tuesday], the chief executive of Google, which employs over 2,000 people in Dublin, described moves such as the US version of Sopa as “worrying”. “We need to act now to avoid the rise of this digital caste system,” said Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

 

Six Reasons Why Irish SOPA May Not Work (Adrian Weckler, DailyBusinessPost.ie)

SOPA Ireland: Irish State Is Dancing To Record Labels’ Tune (Tuppenceworth)

The Minister for Research and Innovation Sean Sherlock (above) said he “welcomed” a decision from the European Court of Justice which ruled that social networks cannot be obliged to install a filter for user-generated content to prevent copyright infringement, saying it will guide Irish courts when looking into similar matters.

 

Minister Welcomes European Court Ruling Against Filtering Content (Silicon Republic)

Acta March in Cork On Saturday

Alan Toner, intellectual property and communications researcher, writes:

The labelling of the copyright amendment as Ireland’s SOPA has been contested by some as inaccurate. There are differences, it is true. Most obviously SOPA is designed to target ‘foreign’ websites, whereas the Irish SI (Statutory Instrument) makes no distinction between foreign and domestic web sites.

Secondly the SI focuses on copyright questions whereas SOPA takes aim at a broader range of alleged ‘intellectual property’ infringements. Participants in the counterfeit medicine trade as well as suppliers of counterfeit materials to the military and federal agencies are made subject to increased punishments. In addition SOPA is more forensic, and paradoxically thus, transparent in the terms of the anticipated consequences: IP (internet protocol) blocking (probably jettisoned at this point), exclusion from search engine results, isolation from financing via advertising or payment systems.

But it is precisely as a result of the open-ended language of the Irish legislation that there is a justifiable fear that such means could be deployed at the discretion of an Irish judge. IRMA’s behaviour – from the negotiation of private enforcement agreements with Eircom to their current suit against the Irish state for the losses sustained as a result of unauthorised uses – indicates how ill-advised it is to make available such an unbounded instrument for their use – these people have just got a bad attitude. Leader of the opposition, Micheal Martin, grotesquely described Sean Sherlock’s handling of the process as ‘perfect’, a remark less surprising if it is recalled that there was a desire amongst the last Fianna Fail/Green coalition to rush copyright enforcement orders through just as they were about to be booted out by the electorate.

Apart from the concerns about the substantive questions about legal consequences, there is a problem with method. When it takes a Freedom of Information request to discover that Enda Kenny held a private meeting last summer with the new head of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Democrat Senator Chris Dodd, then the suspicion that vested interests are intervening in a surreptitious manner to shape the law is fully justified. All the more so when it happens quietly in Castlebar.

Ireland’s Post-SOPA Tsunami (Alan Toner, KnowFuturInc)

Hang on.

Chris Dodd met Enda Kenny?

From The Sunday Times (behind paywall):

(Pic by Dara Robinson)