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

freedomben

VPNs are just tools that sketchy people use for sketchy means. There's no legitimate use for someone who isn't trying to break the law. Allowing these tools let's underage people access porn, and do all manner of undesirable behaviors like accessing region locked content. I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites. There are of course some people on the other side who think VPNs are a guarantee of privacy and secrecy on the internet, but that's pretty rare in my anecdatal experience. I largely blame the rampant ads on podcasts for this view.

HelloUsername

Discussion on 21-jul-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221 141 comments

creatacc

I don't connect to internet without VPN nowdays. Too much tracking today.

xoa

This is a very brief blog blurb linking the original Tech Radar article that got fairly extensive discussion on HN a week and a half ago [0]. Potentially quite an important one though so a second go around may still be very justified for those who missed it last time. Amidst a lot of negative moves around the net recently it's nice to see some sanity at least once in awhile. ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221

Bender

If I were a governmental body I would do everything I could to keep citizens using paid VPN's and big CDN's. Money trails are easy to follow and the majority of people are just paying with their bank. It makes people feel safe and more likely to expose certain behaviors. Paid VPN's can say they do not have logs whilst having real time lawful intercept API's. A handful of VPN providers become a one stop shop to get the data of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions just as a few big DNS over HTTPS providers become a one stop shop to get the DNS of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions. Ban VPN's and people will fall back to the myriad of open source alternatives that can be a bit harder to peel back and get logs assuming any exist in the first place. This was a thing some time ago. Many of the malware and pirate groups were sharing Tinc meshes though as expected there would at times be one person in the group that would be the weakest link and expose the entire group. Expand the numbers of people doing this and the probability of a few groups using decent operational security will increase. This probably deserves it's own write-up.

ofou

privacy is a right, until you don't have a voice to say so.

Arshad-Talpur

First question that need to asked from everyone including ownself , why you need VPN?

dana321

The UK government recently said it was not going to ban VPNs https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/v...

shevy-java

There is a big discrepancy here. EU courts babble about lawful xyz. While they are doing so, national legislation goes downhill, e. g. mandatory age sniffing and other restrictions to come (I claim the age sniffing will come on the OS level, Google recently announced Android will do so, so you can already see the corporate agenda being pushed into democracies here). So I consider the EU courts to just act as decoy, aka "look how everything is legal". Well, a few years later, VPN will be banned. And the EU courts will be in agreement with that. It's a step-by-step strategy.

ibejoeb

> VPNs in particular have been tossed around as something that the UK government would like to ban (citation needed/lacking!) It was widely covered (like at https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july... ) and tech sec. Liz Kendall is on the record with BBC talking about July.

lII1lIlI11ll

This looks like a very narrow ruling regarding copyright. It doesn't guarantee that EU bureaucrats won't try to ban VPNs that don't verify user age (for starters to make NPCs support the bans, then they will inevitably attempt to enforce some kind of KYC or logging to "catch terrorists and pedos".)

ChrisArchitect

Week old post OP; [dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221

raychis

Hurray and good. A technology shouldn’t be treated as unlawful simply because it can be used to bypass restrictions. Restrictions which are stupid in the first place in the majority. I hope VPNs are not becoming the next battleground between online safety and civil liberties. I'm sick of the current ongoing attacks on civil liberties in the Western World under the fake veil of online safety.

m00dy

You can't do much with VPNs these days, almost any website now has antibot systems and it's actually kid's play to detect whether you are on VPN or not.

trklausss

This will also come in handy, when ISPs in Spain turn off VPNs when football plays on the screen: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-ligas-... I guess accessing a streaming service without permission is considered a copyright violation, but blanket-blocking them based on copyright infringement will be legally difficult now...

gizajob

Writer seems to overlook the issue of the UK no longer being in the EU