Rosio Pavoris

The Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) has just won an important legal battle within the context of the dispute that opposes it to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Tiscali, which has become Scarlet Extended Ltd. In its sentence of June 29, 2007, the Court of First Instance of Brussels is demanding from the access provider that it adopts one of the technical measures put forward by the expert in order to prevent Internet users from illegally downloading SABAM’s musical repertoire via P2P software.

From here (PDF warning).
SABAM is trying to set itself up as a defender of poor starving artists (something the RIAA stopped doing years ago), but the implications are obvious: the right to privacy does not exist online.

There is no way to enforce this decision.
The only way that could come close is either running all traffic through something like this (with the extra overhead and reduced speeds that entails; and it’d be trivial to circumvent it with encryption), or just blocking all P2P traffic through packet shaping (and the inevitably enormous amount of false positives and blocking of legitimate traffic that entails; what constitutes P2P, after all, and how would go about reliably distinguishing it from non-P2P traffic?).
This idea that ISPs are able to regulate, or can realistically be held responsible for, what their users do on their network is something I’ve never been able to get. It just shows an incredible ignorance of how the internet works, and what the internet actually is.

Either way, Scarlet isn’t an ISP any self-respecting user should pay money to use.
Scarlet (formerly the Belgian branch of pan-European Tiscali) isn’t the largest ISP in the country by any means (Telenet is, and I think Belgacom is bigger too), and it’d surprise me if there are any people who have no other options, but they’re big enough that this is a real problem.
Though it’s also important to keep in mind that Scarlet isn’t to blame for this; SABAM is, and whatever moron judge presided over this case.

Complain loudly.
This case is exactly like suing the mail system because you can send CD-ROMs of MP3s to people through it. There’s a reason it’s illegal to open other people’s mail.

(Via Slashdot, because I don’t watch the news often enough anymore.)