The ISPs are acting as intermediaries by forwarding warnings from the Brain Institute to their users suspected of swapping copyrighted material. The action is a compromise of sorts, after the ISPs refused to reveal their customers identities directly to the Brain Institute.

“This is a service, a warning to clients that they are doing things that are against the law,” Maaike Scholten, spokeswoman for providers HetNet and Planet Internet, said in a statement.

Back in 2003, the Dutch Supreme Court shook up the worldwide entertainment industry by ruling that file-sharing software wasn’t illegal, thereby setting the stage for entertainment companies to go after individual swappers. U.S. courts have made similar rulings, and the Supreme Court will chime in on the matter sometime this spring.

But there is one Dutch ISP that’s not going along with the Brain Institute. XS4ALL (which for those of you who have trouble reading personalized license plates reads “Access For All”) says they don’t want to be an enforcement arm of the entertainment industry.

“They never even asked us,” XS4ALL spokeswoman Judith Evans said. “I guess they know where we stand.”

Meanwhile, back in the states…

A laundry list of independent record labels has signed on to Shawn Fanning’s vision of authorized peer-to-peer file-trading.

The creator of the original Napster announced that his latest swapping endeavor, Snocap, recently inked deals with Absolutely Kosher , Artemis / Sheridan Square Entertainment, Gammon, Streetbeat / Pandisc / Kriztal Entertainment , Nacional, Nettwerk, OM Records / Deep Concentration , Reality Entertainment and TVT.

Snocap, which counts major labels such as Universal Music Group and Sony / BMG in its corner, is planned as a one-stop authorization clearinghouse for file-trading, thereby simplifying the music licensing process.

One of the points often raised during the lawsuit by the major labels against Fanning’s Napster was that it was virtually impossible for P2P companies to acquire all the licenses needed for authorized file-trading, mainly because several different companies and individuals could hold the various licenses needed to legally trade all the tracks found on a single CD. Snocap’s goal is to provide a central registry with which record labels and publishers can set rules as to how their intellectual property may be traded.

“We are excited to be working with Snocap, as it is clear that music fans enjoy the entire digital music experience, whether it be discovery, sharing or purchasing from tracks found via the Internet,” Artemis / Sheridan Entertainment CEO Daniel Glass said in a statement.

“We want music fans to be able to reach our catalog of artists through a broad range of services, and we are dedicated to expanding access to our content through digital music communities, including peer-to-peer networks.”