Privacy Victory For Dutch Internet Users

silicon: A Dutch judge ruled this week that ISP's do not have to hand over personal information of customers who may be illegally swapping copyright-protected multimedia files. In a nutshell, the research company that Brein (a Dutch organisation representing 52 media and entertainment companies) hired to sniff out would be pirates wrongfully looked at the shared folders on the computers of alleged file swappers. The judge has thereby ruled that in that process - it may have accessed private files. The result? Now, Dutch ISP's don't have to hand over P2P data when asked, unless the plaintiffs meet the necessary conditions to warrant such an order. Obviously, this decision will now make it even harder to crack down on file-sharing pirates in Scandinavia...