Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

On Deputy Eoghan Murphy's point, Ireland has the concept of the take-down notice. I use www.boards.ie and there are other examples with which we are all familiar, such as YouTube. If a person becomes a member of www.boards.ie, the presumption is that the person has signed up to a set of behavioural protocols by which he or she will abide, and will not say anything defamatory or do anything that is in breach of copyright, as an individual user. If the person does that, there is a mechanism so that, through its own monitoring mechanisms, www.boards.ie can expel an errant user or somebody who is, if I may use the term, acting the maggot. Therefore, this already exists as a voluntary code dealing with behaviour.

If, however, we begin legislating in a proscriptive way for every single behaviour on the Internet, we will be going down a very narrow funnel. As I have stated and to answer Deputy O'Dea's question, the informal competitiveness council is to try to come up with a set of actions in regard to the issues we are talking about, which is the correct approach. However, the reason we have had to implement the statutory instrument, as the Deputy will appreciate given he was a member of the last Government, is that this has been ongoing for a considerable period and the State is potentially exposed to being sued by various entities. I must have regard to the fact it is taxpayer's money which is potentially in question.

The point is that I do not believe an Irish judge, if he or she is having regard to the e-commerce directive, will not also have regard to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has come into operation and is the legal entity, and also the SABAM ruling. I do not believe any Irish judge would not adhere to the principles of proportionality in this sense.

To go back to the point about take-down notices, if a hoster decides it is not going to take down the content following a take-down notice on the assumption that this take-down notice is on foot of a real breach of copyright, perhaps it is then open for the person against whom the infringement occurs to seek the injunction. What we want to do is to get into a space in this country where the system operates on a voluntary basis, with clear protocols. To be fair, the music industry needs to adopt new models and needs to begin to get its music on to more platforms, as noted by Deputy O'Dea, and needs to begin finding new mechanisms for selling its music. Already, Netflix is coming on stream, which will also give rise to issues. The more content that is legally available through a multitude of mechanisms, the more likely it is we will encounter copyright theft and piracy issues.

That is where we want to get to. However, I do not believe the State should be too prescriptive about how we get to that point. I would like to see the community coming together on that issue.

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