February 1, 2008

ISP has to hand over customer details

The other day in the European Court of Human Rights it was found that it was illegal for an ISP to hand over details of their subscribers who are believed to be involved in file sharing, they could only do that if a criminal offence had taken place.

But on a different continent things are often so far removed to how we do things, for in Singapore the High Court has ordered the ISP PacNet to hand over their subscribers details, while the ISP’s Singnet and Star Hub already have handed over the personal details of the file sharers as their IP addresses had been logged by Odex.

Odex is a distribution company for many of the popular Anime series from Japan; they have been collecting the IP addresses of alleged file sharers and now wish to pursue this to the next level. PacNet declared a victory in 2007 when the case was thrown out, but with a clever piece of legal jiggery, Odex added the names of the copyright holders to the paperwork and now they are going to have to hand over the details of the five hundred of so alleged file sharers.

Source [Torrent Freak]