European Court of Justice Ruling Prohibits P2P Filtering by ISPs

@ 2011/11/25
The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, ruled that P2P filters installed by ISPs violate the European Directive on electronic commerce as well as fundamental rights. The full ruling can be accessed here. This comes as a major blow to stingy ISPs who conserve and shed bandwidth in the name of checking peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, by somehow deeming that all P2P traffic consists of unlawful sharing of copyrighted content and software.

The ruling is part of a case filed by SABAM (Belgium's equivalent of RIAA), which sued ISP Scarlet for not filtering P2P traffic, and in the process, facilitating copyright infringement. A Brussels Lower Court then ordered Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor the internet traffic of its subscribers. In response Scarlet appealed against the verdict in the European Court of Justice. Scarlet argued that a filtering system would be incompatible with the Directive on electronic commerce and with fundamental rights. The European Court of Justice ruled in agreement with Scarlet.

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