Internet Filtering Case Verdict Expected From European Court of Justice

The European Court of Justice will soon make a ruling in a case between an ISP and a music rights group. The decision will show if an internet service provider can be forced to filter the traffic of their account holders for copyright infringements.

According to TorrentFreak, the Belgian music rights group SABAM and Scarlet ISP are battling for a few years now, the first verdict in 2007 being in favor of the former which wanted to fight against piracy by filtering internet traffic.

Because the system mandated by SABAM didn't function as it was planned, the court undid its first decision and the case was taken over by the Brussels Court of Appeal and now the European Court of Justice has to make a ruling.

In the meantime, intellectual property expert Prof. Cedric Manara published a paper in which he highlights the risks implied by a filtering system, considering the fact that such a mechanism would involve spying on users.

He also mentions that current laws already ban such monitoring systems which could even affect legitimate companies from conducting business due to the way the blocking system functions.

“With such a measure aimed at filtering and blocking everything listed in the collective management society comprehensive way possible, one can imagine a video whose creator or producer wishes to put online; it would be blocked as soon as it was recognized by the access provider leading also to unsolvable conflicts of interest between the artists and producers themselves, both having distinct rights over the same works,” Manara claims.

The main issue is caused by the fact that the system proposed by SABAM is not technically complex enough. The fingerprinting software that was mandated in 2007 failed miserably because it's too difficult to precisely pinpoint if a material is or isn't shared within the law.