Slippery slope of regulation on digital music over ISP's

This is scary. I can see this getting out of hand. A Belgian court has ruled that a Belgian ISP has to install filters to prevent users from downloading illegal music. You can read the details here:

http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz/content/jul2007/gb20070710_974117.htm

When I first heard about his, I wondered how it would work in practice. There is no such thing as a commercially available filter that can tell whether a download is legal or not. How this works 90% of the time, is that they just block all content from certain IP's or from certain applications (in this case, most likely P2P software of every kind). Now that scares me.

If this sets a precedence, what's next? What kind of content can be consumed on the web and what cannot? Does that mean that this ISP must block YouTube.com also because it has illegal and copyrighted material? What happens if a user downloads a legitimate MP3 from a non-listed source? Software can't tell whether this is a legal or illegal download.

I guess, if the technology worked perfectly in determining between a legal and illegal download, there might be a case to be made that it MIGHT work. What really amazes me, is that the court determined that the legal responsibility was on the ISP! Who, frankly, wasn't doing anything wrong. What about the consumer of the downloads? Aren't they really the ones breaking the law?

Logistically, there is no real way to track the pirates, that's why the ISP became the victim. P2P networks by their very nature are not easily shut down. But P2P networks have a lot of garbage mixed in with good tunes. Do you want to know where the really good stuff is? Try the newsgroups. High quality, reliable, and free music all the time and for some reason, no one goes after them.