'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
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Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#2For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:
This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.
It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
But, still:
> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.
Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#3The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#4Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#5Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#6EU posts about it:
Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]
https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
Other blog post:
CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#7That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try
to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they
are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future,
otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial
systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet
predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that
field for your age: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 -
Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#8The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.
Is it a design or implementation flaw?
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#9Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)
Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:
"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."
This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.
Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
#10The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.
That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.