File-swappers' identities protected by Dutch court
Found on The Register on Thursday, 13 July 2006
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.
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.
Be simple, think simple. That's what the entertainment industry does. All Kazaa users (I'm surprised there still are some) should fill their shared folder with thousands of faked music files. This could mess up MediaSentry's system; well, Kazaa too, but it died long ago already.