Fergus Cassidy

Privacy piracy

It was only a matter of time before the music industry hitched its bandwagon to the prevailing politics of fear. If that's the way the politicians are heading, why not get a ride on their coat tails?

Driven demented by the ability of digital technology to overtake a decaying distribution model, the music industry is moving into law enforcement. Forget rock, now it's time to roll.

Last Tuesday's announcement by the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) that it was taking legal action in Ireland against 17 people for alleged illegal music sharing over the internet, was the result of work carried out by a US spy firm hired by Irma earlier this year.

Dick Doyle, Irma's director general, had hinted at such possibilities in 2004. "I think the message we will roll out in the next few months will be aimed at mums and dads to warn them that illegal activities will have consequences", he said [Source: Irish Independent].

These 17 people, who are as yet unidentifed, were described last week as "serial uploaders" and Doyle warned "that's not to say there won't be a second campaign against downloaders".

Ireland wasn't the only country where the music police were deployed last week. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the global recording industry - including Irma - also went on the offensive. It's to be expected from an organisation that has the 1870s word 'phonographic' in its name.

On Tuesday, the IFPI's chairman said that "no one in the music business takes pleasure in enforcing the law against thousands of individuals" but then went on to launch "a very big escalation of our international enforcement campaign against illegal music file-sharing".

However, alongside all this 'enforcing' and the aspirations of an industry to remain relevant, there are very worrying signs that the push by the music business could have serious consequences for privacy rights.

At the Irish announcement last week, Irma's legal counsel said that the organisation had asked a number of Internet Service Providers (ISP) to provide the names of the alleged uploaders. Irma's consultants have the computer addresses of the alleged uploaders but that's all.

For the ISPs to hand over such names would be a breach of the Data Protection Act but yet they were asked anyway. One major Irish ISP thankfully said it would only do so as a result of a court order*.

This brings the situation solidly into data retention territory. While three-year retention of phone call records in this country was quietly sneaked into a bill on terrorism last month, the retention of other telecommunications traffic data (email, web usage etc) is on its way via a EU Framework Directive still in the making.

Data retention of people's email addresses and the web sites they visited would be a boon for the music business enforcers and they are lobbying heavily for it to be introduced. If that doesn't pan out, the music business wants a deal with the ISPs.

At a conference of the European Telecom Network Operators last month, the IFPI suggested a voluntary 'Code of Conduct' for ISPs. Besides demands that ISPs "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders" the IFPI revealed a plan to get around pesky privacy rights.

It suggested that ISPs should adopt new terms and conditions of service to "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement".

Even scarier is the demand that ISPs enforce "terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities".

In response to such trenchant lobbying, the network operators organisation said it was "concerned by the constant pressure to overturn the provisions of the E-Commerce Directive on ISP liability in order to create a situation where intermediaries are liable for illegal content transmitted across their networks".

In its rage against the machines, the music business must be stopped from pursuing piracy at the expense of privacy.

* UPDATE: The Irish Times yesterday (16/04/05) confirmed that Eircom and BT Ireland would not be handing over names to Irma.