A Belgian ISP has escaped paying a €750,000 (£591,000) fine after a Brussels court agreed that it could not reasonably be expected to monitor or control how its members share protected content through P2P networks. The Scarlet ISP was ordered to pay the €2,500-a-day fine (£1,970) by a lower court in July last year after a challenge from the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM). And now according to Out-Law.com, which cites Belgian news outlet The Standard, the court agreed that filtering of users’ content was impossible.

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SABAM successfully convinced the court to impose the content-protection software Audible (NSDQ: ADBL) Magic on Scarlet. But according to Out-Law Scarlet argued that the technology doesn’t work and will appeal to get the entire ruling overturned at a hearing next year. A victory for SABAM would have been a landmark in European law: the European E-Commerce Directive states that ISPs are not responsible for what their users do with copyrighted content. But it’s not cut and dried; the Information Society Directive says that content producers do have the right to challenge anyone involved in piracy. This is far from Belgium’s first copyright row—the newspaper publishers’ coalition Copiepresse has been mired in a lengthy battle with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) over its indexing of online stories to Google News. In May it demanded €49 million (£39 million) in damages from Google after winning a European court case