More for you fans of anti-downloading litigation. The Dutch courts have refused to force internet service providers there to reveal the identities of 42 suspected downloaders. This is quite an interesting decision because while courts elsewhere have been reluctant to force ISPs to reveal the identities of their customers on a day to day basis, once the case against those suspects have been presented in court judges have been generally willing to comply with the record labels' requests.
As you all surely know by now, the ISPs are important in the legal fight against individual file sharers because when record labels track dodgy file sharing online they can only identify the IP address of those they suspect of copyright violation. It is the ISP who knows which IP address is used by which person - but they are very reluctant to hand over the information.
And it seems the Dutch courts think rightly so. When making their judgement on this case the Dutch courts said they were worried about the use of American firm Media Sentry by the record labels to track online file sharing. They also questioned whether the fact that someone stored files in a Kazaa folder was, in fact, illegal, even though people could dip in there and make copies of copyrighted music.
Whether the Dutch courts are right is debatable - the record labels and judges in most other counties would probably argue they are not. But the setback to the anti-piracy cause in the Netherlands is, nevertheless, interesting as regards the ongoing fight against illegal filesharing.