As expected, the Spanish court case involving Spain's record label trade body Promusicae and internet service provider Telefonica reached its conclusion yesterday, which the court ruling that the latter couldn't be forced to reveal the identities of suspected file sharers to the former.
As much previously reported, when record labels want to sue suspected filesharers they rely on internet service providers to reveal the identities of the person who has been filesharing. The ISPs will normally only hand over that information if forced to do so by the courts. The courts willingness to force the ISPs to do just that has varied from country to country. Here in the UK they have, in some other countries they have not.
The refusal of the Spanish courts to force Telefonica to hand over such information was more newsworthy because as part of the case the judge asked for clarification from the European Court of Justice as to whether European copyright laws put any obligations on ISPs in this domain. The ECJ said no, it was a matter for national law, and as the Spanish courts didn't think their own copyright laws did force the ISPs to be helpful in civil cases, Telefonica will not be required to be helpful.
Some are speculating whether, because of the European dimension to the case, this ruling will set a precedent in other countries in the European Union - but given that the ECJ said such matters were really for national law, that would only be the case where native courts were unwilling to act. In the UK, for example, there is a precedent for the courts to force ISPs to reveal their customer's identities if illegal filesharing can be proven, so there'd be most likely a different outcome if the Telefonica case went to court here.
Despite the blow to the Spanish record industry's attempts to find the identities of file sharers as part of its legal battle against P2P, the wider European music industry tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, pointing out that it had set a precedent whereby if national courts ordered ISPs to reveal the identities of their customers, said ISPs couldn't rely on European laws to sidestep that order.