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Music industry's fight against file sharing in the EU might get harder |
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Written by Felix Da Silva (fdasilva@bitnip.com)
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Wednesday, 18 July 2007 |
 An advocate general for the European Court of Justice, released an opinion saying that ISPs are not required to disclose
information that could identify subscribers in civil copyright infringement
cases. This makes the music industry's legal fight against file-sharers in the European Union tougher as
it would make it much more difficult for the labels to obtain identifying
information for the users its investigators discover on file-sharing networks.
Promusicae discovered Telefonica users
sharing music on KaZaA. Promusicae went to court seeking to force
Telefonica to hand over the names and address of those who were allegedly using
the IP addresses on KaZaA. Telefonica refused to comply, saying that
the law only required the ISP to turn over the information in criminal cases,
not civil ones.
However, this is not yet settled case law. Under the Court of Justice procedures, the Court will review the advocate general's
opinion but it usually follows the recommendations or opinions of the advocate general.
If this does go through and that ISPs do not have to disclose customers information, it will be much harder for the music industry to trace back who was infringing of the copyrighted work. This would force the music industry to rely on its ability
to find law enforcement officials with the resources to devote to tracking down
P2P users.
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