'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

sebastiennight

For 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.

ryandrake

The 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.

Havoc

Now 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

EmbarrassedHelp

Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.

ChrisArchitect

EU 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...

shevy-java

That'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)

merb

Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material

kps

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

uhhhhwhaaaa

Landmark? It's Europe. #3. Pareto puts them in the insignificant 80%. Thanks Europe for the cookie message.

phendrenad2

Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.

hahahaa

Yeah silly if ruled otherwise. It would mean copyright defaults to the laggiest country since someone could throw a paper plane with the material over a border.

dzonga

Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites. what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord - communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done. for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough. payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero. the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.

yodsanklai

So much energy to prevent resourceful teenagers from watching porn?

cougarbytes

If they ever make VPNs illegal first they need to add ivanti to the list. For amount of crimes it has committed against IT Security personnel.

rubysprite

If they can target us by IP for surveillance pricing etc. then we need VPN as a basic survival tool. You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc. Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists. Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.

moezd

VPN is a legit technology with real applications, not a toy you spin when lawmakers hurt you. And it's for Anne Frank's diaries out of all disputes? EU lawmakers follow tech trends by a lag of at least a decade and lay waste as they move along. Imagine what they will require once they understand how tech people no longer use chatbots and how much we can control AI agents.