Copyright is becoming an ever-increasingly important part of contemporary lexicon; in Canada, it’s so important that we now have a ‘citizen’s guide‘ to help ‘regular folk’ with their copyright-related concerns. While most eyes are presently focused on the Pirate Bay trial (Ernesto has been blogging about it regularly since the trial started, Jesse Brown’s recent podcast addresses it, etc.), a major ‘success’ in the war on copyright has actually been ‘won’ by Big Media. Ireland’s Eircom has announced that they will be blocking access to peer-to-peer websites in an effort to limit their users’ access to spaces holding copywritten content. This effort to block access is in addition to Eircom’s agreement that they will cut off users who are found infringing on copyright multiple times (a three-strikes rule).

This development substantially ratchets up the question, “What is role(s) do telecommunications companies play in today’s virtualized world, and global digital economy?” Self-imposed private corporations’ policies now threaten to substantially normalize ‘permissible’ modes of both accessing data and determining what accesses are ‘legitimate’ and which are not.

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