As reported by Ireland.com and TorrentFreak Ireland's largest ISP Eircom is being taken to court by the "big four" record labels (EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner). The action seems to centre around whether, in this case Eircom, the ISP should block or filter traffic that violates the companies' copyright. We've spoken about this before, specifically in relation to the UK government considering banning filesharers from the Internet and a block on The Pirate Bay in Denmark. What's interesting in the latter is that the ban made no difference to the amount of people in Denmark visiting The Pirate Bay. Which is part of the point we've made previously about this in if an ISP starts to block or filter certain types of content it just then becomes a battle of one-up-manship; the sites and the users will just start finding new ways of bypassing the block (encrypting traffic for example) and the ISP has to start all over again. It will though be very interesting to keep an eye on this case and to see what the outcome is. Dave Tomlinson PlusNet Product Team
