Belgian ISP Forced To Block P2P Traffic

An anonymous reader lets us know of developments in a case in Belgium that has been under litigation since 2004. The Belgian copyright watchdog SABAM has forced an ISP to begin filtering P2P traffic (PDF). According to the PDF on the SABAM site: "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." The rumor is that Scarlet will be forced to deploy the same software as MySpace uses (Audible Magic) to filter illegal P2P traffic from the legal.

Comments

Zaphod Beeblebrox said it best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aw, Belgium, man! Belgium!

Re:I guess that creates an opportunity

[monk.e.boy]

Hey, lets all burn 3 CDs of mp3s each, and post it to random Belgans.

FILTER THAT, FUCK-WITS

:-P

monk.e.boy

ob

[Hognoxious]

I for one welcome our new Belgian overlords.

SABAM meets university resistance

[192939495969798999]

Let's see how SABAM holds up against the Foreign University and College Kids Exchanging Music group (FUCKEM).

what needs to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said this many times but I'll repeat once again, this general purpose net connection stack tcp/ip has to go. In its place a large defined set of protocols can allow broadcast style networking for the internet savvy consumer, and if Microsoft had the lead in engineering this, you can be sure that most computers would be compatible, and Microsoft could also sell "Microsoft Gateway" products to let Apple participate.

This set of protocols could allow trusted machines to receive properly licensed and authorized content but still filter out other less useful but more dangerous content/extentions like exe's, zips, tar.gz's, bz2, py, and iso's, and additionally any encrypted content, and the major webserver venders would have to outlaw application/octet mime types to regain control of the internet-turned-piracy haven that the thieves like warez groups and gnu have perverted, not to mention all the pornography and child molesting an open internet produces.

Its time to make the net safe again for our families and businesses.

Come on! It won't work!

[i_b_don]

How many times do we have to go over this? there are only three things in life that are certain: Death, taxes, and the guarantee that teen-age boys will find a way to DL their prOn.

Now that's a battle the government will NEVER win.

d