The Supreme Court handed Internet services providers and privacy advocates a crucial victory yesterday when it decided to pass on an important Internet piracy case. . . .
“The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy,” Red Herring reported. “On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena. Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing — a fight it is slowly losing. The lawsuits in question were between New York’s Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C.”
Given that the subpoenas in question were robot-generated, that’s as it should be. I wrote a column on this a couple of years ago. Wired News has more on this case, which is quite significant.
UPDATE: Things are going the other way in Britain, though.