Belgian ISP Forced To Block P2P Traffic

Found on Slashdot on Wednesday, 04 July 2007
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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.

Looks like encrypted traffic will be the future. Oh wait, most Bittorrent applications already offer that. Even if ISPs buy hardware for packet inspection and might figure out how to scan encrypted traffic, then there's always another obvious solution: put the music into a password protected archive. They cannot really block all Bittorrent traffic. Well, they can, but those who use it for legal purposes will tell them some nice stories.