ISPs walk the filesharing wire

If I ran an internet service provider, I'd be as confused as all heck right about now. First you get a Belgian court ruling that ISPs are responsible for the illegal filesharing taking place on their networks - a decision that, inevitably, is now being challenged - and then you get the European Court of Justice standing by you, ruling that ISPs shouldn't have to hand over information on the illegal filesharers themselves.

Yes, I know that subtly different points of law are being contested in these different cases, but the picture that's getting painted here is less than clear for the ISPs, not to mention the users themselves. A lot of this seems to come down to a distinction between "filtering" and "monitoring" - i.e. whether you can filter reliably without infringing on users' privacy - but there's clearly a lot of lobbying going on behind the scenes. Whatever happens, the biggest battles are yet to come.