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Book XII contains the Belgian implementation of the European e-commerce Directive, which includes in its “Section 4: Liability of intermediary service providers” specific provisions related to safe harbours for information service providers providing mere conduit, catching and/or hosting activities

The Court of Appeal of Brussels had to answer the question whether an internet service provider could be required to install a filtering system with a view to preventing the illegal downloading of files. The Court had to consider the extent to which Internet service providers should support the operational and financial burden of the fight against piracy. Given the complexity of the matter, the Brussels Court of Appeal decided to refer two questions to the ECJ before deciding: (1) Can ISPs be compelled to take preventive technical measures in order to prevent illegal downloading? (2) If yes, to what extent technical and financial burdens can be imposed on them? See also the ECJ's Scarlet Extended judgment.

Reversing the decision of the Anvers Court of First Instance of July, 8 2010 and ordering Belgian ISPs, Telenet and Belgacom, to block DNS extensions for 11 domain names related to ThePirateBay. The Court clarified that ISPs do not themselves infringe copyright and are not liable for the content transmitting though their services. However, the safe harbours included in the e-commerce Directive do not prevent the court to order them to block infringing webistes, if, according to Article 8.2 of the Infosoc Directive "their services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or a related right." These blocking orders, the Court continued, do not impose on the ISPs a general obligation to monitor the information that they transmit because the injunction only concerns a number of exhaustively mentioned domain names...

Upholding the request of issuing a permanent blocking order for the primary domain name “thepiratebay.org” and other domain names redirecting to this primary domain name. This criminal proceeding was initiated by a public prosecutor after additional domain names directing to ThePirateBay website, other than those blocked under the civil ruling of September 26, 2011, were registered and put back online. The Court of Appeal upheld the decision issued by the court of first instance. The district court decision upheld a preliminary injunction ordering that all the Belgian Internet operators and distributors must block access to the content hosted by servers linked to the primary domain name "thepiratebay.org" and their IP address 194.71.107.50 and 194.71.107.15, in particular "by employing all possible technical means at...

(1) SABAM, the largest Belgian collective management organisation (CMO), sought to obtain the payment of a copyright levy from Belgian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for communicating to the public its repertoire. SABAM claimed that ISPs communicate to the public its repertoire without authorisation. SABAM demanded 3.4 percent of the ISPs' annual user subscription fees as a compensation for piracy committed by the ISPs' users. (2) As requested by law, SABAM informed the Economic Federal Public Service (SPF Economie), the administrative authority in charge of overseeing CMOs' activities, about its request to the ISPs. The SPF Economie issued a negative opinion regarding SABAM's proposed levy. After some inconclusive negotiations and an initial action started by SABAM against the ISPs but rejected on procedural...

TheCourt found that Facebook’s practice of tracking non-users of Facebook’s surfing history through social plugins, even when the user was not accessing Facebook, violated the Belgian Data Protection Law. The proceeding follows a formal recommendation from the Belgian Privacy Commission requesting Facebook to cease the tracking of non-users. The court imposed a penalty of EUR 250,000 per day for non-compliance. See also Columbia GFE and here