This decision has touched off huge interest throughout Europe and elsewhere, as content providers have been focusing on filtering as a way of getting network providers to use automated technology to stem infringement.  For example, the mandatory use of filtering on content networks is a core issue in Viacom's litigation against Google over YouTube.

This raises a lot of concerns for network service providers.  The most pragmatic issue is that of the cost to implement filtering on a network -- which the network provider would bear if it used a technology such as those from Audible Magic or Philips.  At the heart of the Viacom/Google litigation is a dispute over who should bear the cost of infringement detection: content owners (via so-called takedown notices, according to Section 512 of the DMCA) or network providers (via filtering technology.  Another issue is the disagreements that would inevitably arise if the technology either fails to catch all copyrighted content or produces false positives, i.e., filters content on a network that is allowed to be there after all. 

The broadest issue around mandatory filtering, however, relates to network providers' status as "just the wires," which has enabled them to avoid content-related liability (which encompasses libel, fraud, and obscenity as well as copyright infringement).  In Europe, this is embodied in Article 15 of the EU E-Commerce Directive, while in the United States it is known as common carrier status.

The judge in the Belgian case decided that the use of fingerprint filtering does not mean that an ISP "selects or modifies" content, and therefore that the technology can be mandated without otherwise affecting the ISP's content-related liabilities.  This is a controversial point and thus is likely to be a matter of intense debate when, inevitably, similar actions are brought against ISPs elsewhere in Europe.

Although American legal representatives of both network service providers and content owners are also likely to look closely at this Belgian case, the situation is different in the US.  The 2005 Supreme Court ruling in FCC v. Brand X drew a distinction between types of network services that gave US telcos a comfort level that content control features used on their ISPs will not affect common carrier status of their standard telecommunications networks.  This comfort level has been a factor in ISPs seeking to collect "tolls" from content providers in exchange for preferential treatment of their content on the networks -- leading to the debate over so-called net neutrality. 

As a result, US telcos are nowhere near as fiercely protective of their Internet services' common carrier status as they used to be.  This explains, for example, AT&T's recent decision to cooperate with film studios in exploring filtering technologies on its massive network.

At the same time, the impact of the Belgian court decision in enshrining digital rights technologies into law is potentially huge.  This is a landmark case for Belgium, Europe, and beyond.

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