Privacy Prevails, BREIN Loses
Dutch anti-p2p organization BREIN has been thwarted in its bid to force five ISPs to reveal the identities of alleged file sharers
… thanks to MediaSentry.
“BREIN used the application to link the files with user’s IP addresses, a practice which came under fire from expert testimony as well as the Dutch court,” says DigitalMusicWebLog, pointing out MediaSentry software, “has been widely criticized for being too limited and simplistic, taking filenames at face value and violating the legally protected privacy of users in some countries by ‘scanning’ entire shared directories of specific users”.
The way MediaSentry collected and processed IP addresses were had no lawful basis under European privacy laws, adds the story.
But this is nothing new.
Media sentry presented, “shoddy and, ultimately, extremely costly, results to one of its clients,” we posted last November, going on:
“It blew the game for the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) in 2004 when the latter demanded that a Canadian court order five ISPs to hand over the names of clients. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein was singularly and quotably unimpressed by MediaSentry ‘evidence’.
“Then the company blew it again in Holland when the District Court of Utrecht decided MediaSentry’s investigation of p2p file sharing wasn’t only flawed, it was ‘unlawful,’ ruling that Dutch ISPs didn’t have to provide customer information to the CRIA’s Netherlands counterparts.”
