The advocate general of the European Court of Justice issued his long awaited opinion in the SABAM case, a case that discusses the ability of ISPs to filter Internet content in order to detect illegal copyright infringements. The advocate general highlights the tension between privacy rights and copyright, and the criteria that must be satisfied in order for a filtering measure to be constitutionally valid in Europe. In the SABAM case, the advocate general found that one of the constitutional criteria was lacking, because Belgium had not enacted a specific law that would permit the kind of filtering that had been ordered by the court in the SABAM case. The opinion is summarized by Hogan Lovells privacy lawyer Winston Maxwell in a recent article. The article also discusses the TalkTalk case in the United Kingdom.
