Belgian Court Requires ISP to Enforce Copyright

A court in Belgium has ordered that an ISP named Scarlet Extended SA must install technology to prevent its customers from illegally sharing pirated content over its network. The ISP has six months to comply, before facing fines of approximately $3,400 a day. The news, reported in Macworld, is the subject of a recent Techcrunch post where Nick Gonzalez writes:

Now copyright holders are again trying to go after the bottleneck for piracy, the networks themselves. Because filtering technologies no longer place as harsh a burden on content providers, the industry is in transition and expectations are changing.

As evidence of that, Gonzalez points to this announcement that AT&T will work with the music and film industries to fight piracy on its network, and YouTube's efforts to remove copyrighted materials from its site.