No Checkpoints On The Information Superhighway?

The Court of Justice of the European Union finds that ISPs cannot be forced to monitor their users in a decision of 24 November 2011.

The advent of peer-to-peer file sharing has led to tension between the content and technology industries. Content industries, negatively affected by copyright infringement, have, through legal actions, attempted to force intermediaries, such as ISPs and hosts, to take active steps to prevent such infringement. In Ireland, these attempts famously culminated in a series of cases between record labels and ISPs. This litigation left matters somewhat up-in-the-air: The Irish High Court in one such case accepted the voluntary adoption, by one of Ireland's leading ISPs, Eircom, of a policy of terminating the internet access of suspected file sharers, but also found, in a separate case, that another ISP, UPC, could not be forced to adopt such an approach. These cases precipitated a consultation by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and