Belgian government blocks P2P traffic

[Dominus Atheos]

Slashdot

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.

[Chris OFarrell]

Pft this is going to work well. So they are going to analyze every damn packet are they, to see if it contains p2p traffic?

[dragon]

Ok so while they might be able to catch a few people by random scanning packets kind of like check points for dui's it will bring up thing such as invasion of privacy issues. Plus scanning more than just a small precentage of the traffic is going to require some serious hardware. Hell just to scan our limited network for unacceptable packets we have several dedecated (sp) servers running full time and they only randomly scan about 5% of the network.

[Bounty]

The thread title is bull.

The court ordered *one* obscure ISP to filter P2P traffic if used to share works protected by SABAM, specifically on Bittorrent. Apart from being virtually impossible, it's also illegal (as BT is a legitimate form of digital distribution) and no ISP in their right mind would do this voluntarily. The closest any major ISP came to fighting P2P was when Belgacom stopped hosting a few newsgroups.

This will go to appeals and get shot down. SABAM is the Belgian RIAA, except without the competence or perseverance - plus their catalogue, the only one they can protect, is extremely limited.

This will be heralded as a victory for SABAM for a while and overturned or just plain ignored. This is Belgium, finding loopholes is our national sport.

[Dartzap]

I have to say that Dominus does seem to have a thing about trying to find things that make Europe look bad...but..if you look..it A)Rarely happens B) is so daft it never gets beyond proposition C) comes from not understanding a legal system.

Nice try though, but you miss all the big stinkers that everyone generally knows

[Dominus Atheos]

I have to say that Dominus does seem to have a thing about trying to find things that make Europe look bad.

I take offense at that statement.

It completely ignores my efforts at trying to find things that make Canada, Australia, the southern states, and the mid-western states look bad.

Seriously though, I do post anything that makes anyone look bad, including New Mexico to Legislate Pluto as a Planet, "ZOMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" law from Connecticut, and Massachusetts Makes Health Insurance Mandatory... along with Australia outlaws the light bulb,and Black celebrities harassed by...Mounties?

[Dark Hellion]

This is Belgium, finding loopholes is our national sport.

I thought it was drinking and waffle making. Thanks for ruining my heritage.