The Dutch courts have
ruled that BREIN will not be getting any identities of file sharers from ISP's.
The Anti-Piracy organisation BRIEN had requested user information from 5 isps
including Wanadoo and Tisca. The isps went to court and BREIN's request was
rejected by the courts. The court said that the way in which a US company MediaSentry had collected
information had no lawful basis in European privacy laws. The lower court had
already reached this decision.
The court concluded that
MediaSentry can't properly identify users and the methods in which it found
people weren't enough to prove copyright infringement. MediaSentry has already
been criticised for its software being too simplistic, it takes names shared at
face value, as well as inspecting the whole shared folder which breaks privacy
laws.
BREIN is will be
appealing the decision in the higher courts to find the information on the
42 suspected file sharers.
 A Dutch
appeals court has thwarted attempts by the Dutch anti-piracy organisation
BREIN to get the identities of file-sharers from five ISPs, including
Wanadoo and Tiscali. The court found that the
manner in which IP addresses were collected and processed by US company
MediaSentry had no lawful basis under European privacy laws. A lower court
in Utrecht had reached a similar conclusion last year.
The court also argued that the software MediaSentry
uses can't properly identify users or provide evidence of infringement.
Last year, expert witnesses at Delft
University of Technology criticised MediaSentry's software for being too
limited and simplistic. For instance, MediaSentry took filenames in Kazaa
at face value. More importantly, the software scans all the content of the
shared folder on the suspect's hard disk. In that process, it breached
privacy laws.
The Dutch Protection Rights Entertainment Industry
Netherlands (BREIN) represented 52 media and entertainment companies and
has been investigating 42 people suspected of swapping song files. Nine
file-sharers decided to settle with BREIN.BREIN says it will go to a higher court, but lawyer Christiaan
Alberdingk Thijm, who represented the ISPs, sees the decision as an
important victory. |
Source: The Register
