Belgian ISP Appeals Court-Ordered Filtering

From the OpenNet Initiative...

The ISP Scarlet (formerly Tiscali SA) has appealed a Belgian court’s order to implement a filtering mechanism as part of granting an injunction against music piracy. On June 29, 2007, the Brussels Court of First Instance (decision available here) ordered Scarlet to implement one of seven filtering ‘solutions’ to prevent P2P file-sharing of copyrighted material over its network. Scarlet was sued by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) in June 2004, and upon granting SABAM a temporary injunction in November 2004 the court appointed an outside expert to conduct a technical and commercial evaluation of filtering applications.

In apparently the first inquiry its kind in Europe, the expert investigated 11 types of filtering tools, found only 7 P2P blocking mechanisms to be applicable to Scarlet, and out of these determined that only one was capable of parsing out specific protected musical content. Audible Magic’s CopySense application claims to cover over 70 percent of copyrighted songs shared over the Internet. In support of its decision the court promoted Audible Magic’s deals to supply its ‘digital fingerprinting’ system to Internet giants such as MySpace and Microsoft. It also accepted the expert’s calculation that the cost of rolling out CopySense would be minimal—estimating that the 3 year cost spread out over 150,000 people would only be .50 euros a month.

In citing the technical and automatic nature of this filtering mechanism, the court rejected all of Scarlet’s arguments...

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