The Dutch music industry has demonstrated how not to build
a case against alleged file-swappers. They lost their case because Media
Sentry, the company they hired to snoop on P2P users, was only able to prove that
the defendants had copyrighted files in their shared
folders, not that those files were ever uploaded to other users (which is the illegal part). Oops!
Update: Commenter Abbie pointed us to P2Pnet's story on the case, which makes The Register's (and my) reporting look pretty sloppy. P2Pnet's version says that the Dutch music industry's case was doomed by its reliance on an overseas third party (Media Sentry is based in the U.S.) which didn't sign a Safe Harbor agreement to conform to European privacy protection laws.
1. The Register's story, on which you've base this post, is both short on information and flawed. Uploading was not a consideration in this case, as far as I know. BREIN, representing the music industry, actually won some points (it was established that it could pursue a civil case and request for the IDs behind IP addresses), but its claims were rejected (mainly) because a professional, American third-party organisation was used to the collection of IP addresses. This was considered a violation of Dutch data protection law, notably because it was MediaSentry did not sign a Safe Harbour agreement to adhere under European privacy rules.
Well, I'm mostly paraphrasing this p2pnet story, which has the details: http://p2pnet.net/story/5539
Posted at 4:32AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Abbie