Music
11 Mar 08

Record labels taking Eircom to court

Four major record companies have brought a High Court action against eircom, aimed at compelling the telecoms provider to block access to illegal file-sharing services over its network.

The case has been brought before the commerical court by EMI Records (Ireland), Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Ireland), Universal Music (Ireland) and Warner Music (Ireland).

The managing director of EMI Ireland, Willie Kavanagh, said that the record industry was experiencing a 'dramatic and accelerating' decline in income and that Eircom was "well aware" its facilities were being used to violate the property rights of record companies "on a grand scale".

The four companies are pushing for eircom to use filtering software, such as that developed by Audible Magic in the US, in order to block peer-to-peer (P2P) downloads of copyrighted music by its users. Solicitors for eircom have previously stated that the company has no legal obligation to monitor the traffic on its network.

This is the first time a case of this nature has been taken against an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Ireland. Previous cases targeted individual users of the file-sharing services.