This just in from the "Oh goody, it's already here" department:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9027623
Belgian ISP appeals content-filtering mandate
Distinction between filtering and monitoring appears to be overly
fine, observers say
[Eh? If an ISP can monitor content, it can filter it.
It might require a fair amount of work to monitor it,
of course, especially on Usenet where copyrighted content
-- mostly salacious pictures, AFAIK -- is passed around
in the alt.binaries hierarchy, and most of the time
gets clobbered in the process. I've not looked in the
alt.binaries hierarchy because of limited bandwidth --
Teranews' free service only allows 60 MB of downloads per
day, which is more than enough for my limited text needs
but I'd have troubles if I wanted to get Usenet-transmitted
stuff -- but suspect that there's a fair amount of goofing
up in there, from the posting of raw content (which will
look like gibberish) to the mangling of sectioned posts.
The ISP could also monitor BitTorrent usage, which is on
a well-known port. Of course, there's the issue of how
an ISP can monitor traffic through an encryption tunnel.
SSH users, take note.]
July 23, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- A Belgian Internet service
provider has appealed a ruling that it must block illegal
file-sharing on its network, in a case that tests two European Union
directives concerning copyright and the extent of responsibility
that ISPs have for transmitted content.
[I'd certainly love to know the details on this. The original suit
had to do with music files, probably MP3s, according to the very
last paragraph of the article.]
[...]
While the EU E-Commerce Directive says that ISPs are
mere conduits and not liable for monitoring content
on their networks, the court disagreed, ruling that
filtering is not the same as monitoring.
"It's a distinction that the judge makes with very
little explanation," said Struan Robertson, senior
associate with Pinsent Masons and editor of the
legal Web site Out-law.com. The judgment "simply
says the mere conduit defense is irrelevant in the
circumstances."
[And it probably is, as quantum mechanics clearly states
that to observe, one must interact. Of course this is
a far higher level, but on store-and-forward systems
such as Usenet one can easily monitor general usage, and
might monitor and filter specific patterns that hint at
copyright infringement, such as excessive bandwidth use
and overreliance on the "^begin" and/or application/base64
encodings.]
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Linux. Because life's too short for a buggy OS.
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