Ireland’s largest internet service provider (ISP), Eircom, will today be introducing what’s been called a “three strikes” approach to filesharing that will see repeat offenders cut off.

Hard to tell what they're trying to signify, but it's a great shot.

The ‘three strikes’ rule was first discussed during the legal battle between Eircom and a number of publishers including Sony, EMI, universal and Warner, with labels pushing for a graduated response from Eircom. The case came just after Eircom advertisements appeared on the Pirate Bay’s homepage. In September of last year, Eircom agreed to block its users from visiting the Pirate Bay, and eventually drew up the graduated response system that’s come to be known as the three strikes rule.

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It seems that Google has accused publisher Viacom of uploading its own content to Google’s video service, YouTube, before suing the company for the fairly hefty sum of $1 billion for copyright infringement.

Broadcast yourself, and then sue, perhaps

It’s interesting stuff, especially given the fairly pronounced impact that cases as big as Viacom’s have had on YouTube’s ability to add content. Moreover, Reuters reports that Viacom has gone public with a number of emails sent back and forth between YouTube staff that give the impression that things aren’t quite as cut and dry as well they might have seemed. Indeed, it goes right to the top, with a message sent between YouTube’s co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim simply reading,

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YouTube has announced that it’s hit a fairly impressive milestone this week, managing to hit fully 24 hours of video uploaded to the service every minute, up from 20 hours in May of last year.

YouTube has become startlingly grim...

It might not seem like all too impressive a statistic in terms of growth, but given that it’s an extra four hours every minute, there’s not an awful lot to compare it to; the sheer amount of content (regardless of whether or not anyone watches it) is pretty staggering. The folks from YouTube put together a fairly impressive list of things that happen inside the 24 hours that people might be able to compare it to… so, in terms of content updated to YouTube, one minute is the time that:

“The earth rotates 360 degrees as it orbits the sun
The second hand on your bedside clock ticks 86,400 times
The most skilled climber reaches Mount Everest’s summit
2.5 days go by on Jupiter”

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It seems that ebook reader owners free ride when it came to copyrighted materials illicitly downloaded could well be coming to an end with news that Rapidshare has been ordered to filter books out of its content.

We'll be curious to see how big an impact this filtering has...

Indeed, it seems that the web-based file-transfer company could well face some fairly serious consequences if it fails to comply with the order. According to TorrentFreak, the company could face fines of $339,000 or see some of its higher-ups jailed for a failure to comply with the ruling. As part of the ruling, Rapidshare will be required to actively police its service, ensuring that around 148 titles never find their way onto the file-sharing site.

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