Digital Top Stories

Eircom launches music service and recommits to three-strikes

By | Published on Thursday 9 December 2010

The Irish internet service provider which has voluntarily (well, as the result of an out of court settlement in a legal dispute) introduced a three-strikes style system for combating file-sharing, Eircom, yesterday announced the launch of its own streaming music service, the carrot to accompany the three-strikes stick.

Eircom’s MusicHub offers free Spotify-style streaming, but without the ads, to all of the net firm’s existing customers. As you’d expect, playlisting functionality is also included. As well as the streaming music, the MusicHub will also offer a range of bundled download packages where the unit price for each track downloaded could be as low as 32 cents. The latter service will also be available to non-Eircom customers.

Although restricted to Ireland, the Eircom digital music platform is interesting beyond the country’s borders because it is an example of an ISP collaborating with the record industry to create an engaging competitively priced music service in return for committing to crack down on file-sharers.

Many people, on all sides of the three-strikes debate, have long argued that if the record industry worked with ISPs to create compelling music services – giving the net firms a commercial incentive to crack down on file-sharing – then the music business would find internet companies much more willing to help on piracy issues.

In the UK there have been few such collaborations. The record companies would probably blame the ISPs for expecting too much for too little, while the net firms would probably argue the label’s price point expectations are too high. The closest we’ve got to a high profile record industry/net company collaboration was Virgin Media’s partnership with Universal Music, though their ambitions – unlimited MP3 downloads for a monthly subscription fee – were too grand to get enough of the record industry on board.

Launching the new service yesterday, Eircom’s Stephen Beynon told CMU: “MusicHub is a major development for Eircom in the online content space. We are the first and only internet provider in Ireland to offer online streaming as part of a music service. Customers will not find a greater selection of music across all genres anywhere else in Ireland from their broadband provider”.

In a separate statement issued yesterday, Eircom reconfirmed its commitment to operate a three-strikes – or “graduated response” to use their words – system for combating piracy. Warning letters will be sent to customers who content owners believe are illegally file-sharing. Those who fail to heed warnings will have their net connections suspended or ultimately disconnected. Eircom’s statement stressed net suspensions was a “measure of last resort”.

The net firm said that since trialling the three-strikes system in June they have been receiving approximately 1000 complaints a week from content owners about file-sharing customers. Of course, with only Eircom currently operating this system in Ireland, any file-sharers who are threatened with disconnection could take their business elsewhere. The Irish record industry is trying to both persuade and force other net firms to introduce a similar system, but so far without success.

Meanwhile, Eircom will be hoping that a portion of those file-sharing are still doing so in ignorance of the law and can be educated to stop. Another portion may be sufficiently impressed with the MusicHub to stop file-sharing so they can stick with Eircom. Any more committed file-sharers may be lost to rivals until any wider three-strikes system can be enforced (although more committed file-sharers are probably now using technology that hides their file-sharing from content owners anyway, so there’s a high chance they’ll not even be targeted under the three-strikes system).

Justifying its involvement in the three-strikes party, while insisting it would not breach its customers’ rights in the process, Eircom added: “This company believes that it has a duty to ensure that the rights of artists and the laws of the state, including copyright law, are upheld, and to take action when illegal activity is brought to our attention. Our obligations to our customers remain paramount, and the primacy of their rights, in particular their rights to privacy, are reflected in the phased structure of the [three-strikes] protocol, and in the Eircom MusicHub service launched today. Eircom is of the view that these obligations are part of a role that all responsible companies must serve”.



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