It’s not just the Germans that don’t get how the internet works. The Belgian copyright organisation Sabam won a case in the Brussels court against Scarlet, one of the Belgian internet providers, to stop illegal p2p music downloads.
The idea is to use filters on all p2p traffic and block illegal downloads. That might work in theory, but in reality this means Scarlet will have to be building a huge filtering system tracking all p2p downloads from it’s customers. Privacy anyone?
As with all filtering systems, there will be ways to bypass them by using tunnels, or simply making the transfered files unrecognisable for the filters. How about legal downloads btw? How will those filters know the difference?
Sabam is doing the same thing RIAA has been doing in the States. Instead of changing their failing business model and fix their own problem they are putting the blame with the ISPs and forcing them to fix their problem. Instead of finding a way to offer legal music on the internet in a flexible way that people are willing to use, they are trying to block downloads instead, because they want to sell more plastic disks filled with 50% filler people don’t want to hear.
Look at iTunes ffs, it’s not like people don’t want to legally buy music online right?
Scarlet is of course appealing the sentence in court. Hopefully a judge with some more knowledge of the internet will be in charge of that case…