The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued its ruling on the issue of P2P filters: they are banned. Therefore, other avenues must be explored to protect authors’ rights.
P2P anti-piracy filters are officially banned as of today: the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled in this regard, considering the legal proceedings between the Belgian ISP Scarlet and SABAM.
This means that service providers will not be able to implement preventive filters in any way to prevent users from downloading material via P2P systems.
It is also established that national judges cannot accept such behavior from providers, nor can they impose filters on them.
In doing so, a series of user rights would be infringed: as stated in the public documents, “An injunction of this kind does not respect the prohibition of imposing a general monitoring obligation on such a provider, nor the need to ensure a fair balance between intellectual property rights, on the one hand, and freedom of business, the right to personal data protection and the freedom to receive or communicate information, on the other“.
A few months ago on FullPress we already discussed the issue of peer-to-peer filters specifically concerning the Scarlet Extended – Sabam case: last April, a first opinion perfectly in line with today’s ruling was given by Cruz Villalon, Advocate General of the European Union. Exactly as stated in these hours, imposing filters cannot be the optimal solution to limit piracy because, first of all, it would also affect the interests of customers who do not use bandwidth to download illegal material; furthermore, it would interfere with the concept of communication secrecy and freedom of information.
European providers will therefore have to study new ways from today to prevent copyright protection companies from imposing methods to avoid piracy on them.
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