Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Netherlands Court Rejects Media Sentry Investigation as Unlawful; Orders ISP's Not to Turn Over Confidential Subscriber Information

We have just obtained a copy of the July 12, 2005, decision of the District Court of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, in Foundation v. UPC Nederland in which it was held that Media Sentry's investigation of peer to peer file sharing over software such as that supplied by Kazaa and Grokster was flawed and not "lawful", and that the internet service providers were not permitted to divulge subscriber information to the RIAA's Netherlands counterparts.

Court's decision
(Alternate link) (Alternate link #2) (Alternate link #3)(Alternate link #4)

Expert witness declaration
(Alternate link) (Alternate link #2) (Alternate link #3)(Alternate link #4)

Documents furnished courtesy of
Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm
SOLV Advocaten
P.O. Box 75538
1070 AM Amsterdam

Schippersgracht 1-3
1011 TR Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T +31 20 5300160
F +31 20 5300170
M +31 6 25017 235
E thijm@solv.nl
W www.solv.nl


These are the attorneys who successfully represented the defendants.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness the courts in a few other countries have more sense than the ones in the US seem to. Being sued anonymously and not even know that you're being sued, with no possibility of representing yourself is about as low as you can go, but that is just what the RIAA in America is doing... even dead 85-year old grandmas aren't safe.

Some of the tactics used by these anti-p2p investigation firms are unethical at the very least and illegal at worst, as the Dutch courts agree. Their snooping on network traffic violates basic privacy laws as far as I understand them.

I would like to see a day when p2p users unite in a class action suit against these firms and take them to court for disrupting legitimate network traffic and eating up bandwidth with DOS attacks (denial of service) and SYN Floods. When they find a user engaged in p2p activities, they bombard his routher with a constant stream of requests that are never answered. It slows everything down to a crawl. Proving that these firms are being the DOS attacks, though, is another matter.