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."

The rumor is that Scarlet will be forced to deploy the same software as MySpace uses (Audible Magic) to filter illegal P2P traffic from the legal.

The new filtering system, known as FileRights, automatically removes offending search links using a database of copyrighted works, CNET reports. Though the database is maintained by FileRights, the onus is on the content owners to keep it updated. Video search engine isoHunt, a TorrentSpy competitor, will also use the system.

The MPAA filed suit against TorrentSpy in February of 2006, accusing the BitTorrent-based site of facilitating downloads of copyrighted material. The introduction of FileRights comes in the wake of a federal court ruling that ordered TorrentSpy to begin tracking its own users as a way of collecting evidence in the suit.

Envision a world where your ISP does the copyright policing at the behest of the movie studios, television networks, and music labels, where no copyrighted content stays up on a user's account for more than 24 hours. It sounds like a dream for Big Content, but it's also a nightmare for customers of Australian ISP Exetel.

An Exetel support page which features the top ten support questions from the previous month. A frequently asked question from customers is why their multimedia files keep disappearing from their accounts. Exetel says that it takes a "hard approach to copyright issues," and since April 2005 the ISP has run a script that deletes all multimedia content with common extensions including .avi, .mp3, .wmv, and .mov.

NBC/Universal's general counsel Rick Cotton must just be trying to push his anti-piracy comments to absurd levels to see just how much he can get away with.

"In the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment."

As Public Knowledge points out, first off, movie theaters are doing great this year, suggesting the big "threat" of piracy had a lot less to do with its troubles than the fact that it just didn't have that many compelling movies the past few years. Also, corn farmers are doing quite well (and people still eat popcorn at home while watching pirated movies).

By the very same reasoning, I could say "If all movies were pirated, then everyone would have that additional money they didn't spend on movies to spend on things like fancy dinners. Restaurants would be more crowded. Farmers would make more money by being able to sell more profitable food at higher prices."

Dubber is a lecturer at the University of Central England who writes a great blog about the music industry focused on new strategies for the industry. Birch is the head of Revolver Records. The email conversation goes back and forth as Birch insists that Dubber's link to a Download Squad post was somehow inappropriate. The link is about someone fighting back against yet another bad lawsuit by the RIAA. Why is it inappropriate? That's hard to parse from Birch's rambling emails, but it appears to have something to do with giving support to people who hate the RIAA. In the end, after Dubber explains that criticism of actual events seems valid, and Birch responds that if Dubber doesn't take down his post, he's going to report Dubber to his university.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."

There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement. The first is that "hundreds of billions of dollars a year" is a myth. The MPAA's own cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The second objection, of course, is that the traditional crimes Cotton describes often involve the destruction of people's lives along with property. Burglaries can result in homicide, as can fraud (ask the preacher's wife), while bank robbery is without a doubt a dangerous game. Those crimes also typically involve real property.

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree told OUT-LAW that they should have realised in 1997 that their battle was already lost.

Rowntree advises digital rights advocacy group the Open Rights Group and has been a vocal opponent of the mainstream record industry's policies of chasing individual file sharers. When told that the last Blur album was leaked on to the internet he reportedly said "I'd rather it gushed".

Rowntree said that the major labels' policies of putting digital rights management (DRM) technology on music CDs to attempt to stop them being copied and shared backfired spectacularly.

"DRM was doomed to fail because the people who it was designed to stop, as in the counterfeiters or the mass file sharers or the people doing it for political reasons could easily bypass it," he said.

"But the people who were caught in the trap of DRM were the ordinary people who wanted to play their CDs on their computer as well as their CD recorder or who wanted to make a tape of it to put on in the car who were doing things that most people regardless of the law would regard as legitimate activities."

The courts have for the first time found that the electronic trail briefly left in a computer server's RAM, or random access memory, by each visitor to a site is "stored information" and must be turned over as evidence during litigation, according to documents seen by CNET News.com.

This may be the first time that anyone has argued that information within RAM is electronically stored information and therefore subject to the rules of evidence, Chooljian said according to court records. Up to now, many Web sites that promised users anonymity, such as TorrentSpy, believed they need only to switch off their servers' logging function to avoid storing user data.

In one of the most hotly contested disputes so far in the case, the records show that the MPAA accused TorrentSpy of trying to conceal evidence when the search engine began directing visitors to the servers of an outside vendor.

The company's attorney, Ira Rothken, said Friday that it is unlikely TorrentSpy would continue operations in the United States if forced to turn over user data.

The Pirate Bay file-sharing collective, one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading, is only the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright - or pro-piracy - movement that is striking terror in the heart of an industry that seems ever less capable of stopping it.

When the Pirate Bay's Stockholm headquarters were raided last May and their servers seized, the Motion Picture Assn. of America thought it had scored a major victory. "Swedish Authorities Sink Pirate Bay," trumpeted its news release. (As has since been pointed out, this is a mixed metaphor.) But the rejoicing didn't last long. The site was back online three days later, and worse yet for Hollywood, the raid and several mass protests afterward generated so much sympathy for the pro-file sharing cause that both candidates for prime minister announced publicly that they did not think young file-sharers should be treated as criminals.

The Pirate Bay has built its reputation on taunting big entertainment and scoffing at copyright law. One of its claims to fame is its online gallery of legal threats, each of which is appended with a less-than-polite riposte from the pirates.

The Liberal Party (Venstre) Congress states that today's legal frameworks for copyrights are not adapted to a modern society. New technology gives artists and consumers vast opportunities, but also creates challenges. The balance between consumer demands, a society's need for openness and access to culture, and the artists' right to revenue and attribution, must improve.

Copyright law is outdated. A society where culture and knowledge is free and accessible by everyone on equal terms is a common good. Large distributors and copyright owners systematically and widely misuse copyright, and thereby stall artistic development and innovation.

We need new ways of compensating artists and copyright holders, to make free file sharing possible. Laws and regulations, both national and international, need to be changed so they only regulate limitations of use and distribution in a commercial for-profit context.

Recreation of old works should be regulated as fair use, and the existing laws against plagiarism are more than enough to protect the rights of copyright holders.

The Liberal Party wants a shorter copyright life span.

The Liberal Party wants to prohibit technical limitations on consumers' legal rights to freely use and distribute information and culture, collectively known as DRM.