As some of you may have noticed, Twitter and Facebook were under Blackout orders for the past while. Everywhere you looked, you would find avatars completely black. This was to protest the Guilt Upon Accusation law which was coming into effect in New Zealand which would basically disconnect anybody in New Zealand from the Internet if they were even accused of downloading copyright content. While you can read much more about this (Partially successful – they postponed the law) protest here, this post is to suggest something similar for Ireland.

From SBPost.ie,

Irish Internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping websites, as Internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry. Eircom, the country’s biggest Internet provider, is to start blocking its Internet customers from accessing music swapping.

What’s more, the Irish Recorded Music Association (the Irish RIAA) has told all the other ISPs to follow suit or face legal action. Add this to the new three strike rule Eircom imposes on it’s users, and madness may well break out.

If the music industry is successful, Ireland will become the first European country to completely block access to hundreds of file-sharing websites.

I think that it is time for Ireland to try a similar tack to show Eamon Ryan TD and the Irish Media. Here are a few ideas on how to protest this without spending much time on it at all.

1. Make a totally black avatar and set it as your avatar across as many sites as you can. In case you are lazy, I have attached a few at the end of this blog post.
2. If you use Twitter, search for the tag #BlackoutIRL and keep watch there.
3. If you are on Facebook, write a note about the blackout and get all your friends to blackout their avatar as well. In fact, just copy-paste this entire blog post if you want. It’s not copyright, after all.
4. Contact Minister Eamon Ryan about this important communications issue. Tell him how important this issue is, and how he needs to stop it. His details are as follows. Please be polite.

Eamon Ryan TD
Dáil Éireann
Leinster House
Kildare Street
Dublin 2
Ireland

Tel: 01 – 618 3097

Fax: 01 – 618 4363

His site is at www.greenparty.ie/people/eamon_ryan (side note- that site really needs cleaning up. Apparently his phone number is “http://www.eamonryan.ie“. His email address is eamon.ryan@oireachtas.ie, if you are not going to send a letter. Again, please be polite, and thanks to James Cooley for pointing these out in the comments!

The IRMA may be contacted at 353 1 280 65 71

Much more information can be found about this at the following places

http://torrentfreak.com/music-industry-orders-bittorrent-blackout-090223/

http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=NEWS-qqqs=news-qqqid=39782-qqqx=1.asp

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0217/1224241279708.html

Here are the pre designed avatars I made. If you want to use one of them, go ahead. Right-click the image, and press “Save image as”

Tags: blackout, eircom, Facebook, twitter