Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important
Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important
A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was wheth…
This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.
That's a pretty big jump that the article makes... Here's what the decision is about:
The Court, sitting as the Full Court, holds that the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights
They also said that, which is true:
EU law does not preclude national legislation authorising the competent public authority, for the sole purpose of identifying the person suspected of having committed a criminal offence, to access the civil identity data associated with an IP address
I should point out that copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, it's a civil matter.
None of this adds up to what the article claims.
I think the decision itself highlights the dichotomy between the EU’s push for the right of digital privacy for citizens of its constituent nations when using products and services and the EU’s push to have unrestricted insight into the digital lives of those same citizens.
You can’t have digital privacy from select third parties only, it’s an all or nothing thing. If you don’t want your citizens to be tracked and their browsing data sold, don’t allow websites or ISPs to track that data. If you don’t want that data to be sold, but you want it tracked and accessible to the government then call it a right to not be monetized, not a right to privacy.
I agree that the article itself is pretty duplicitous as well. None of rhetoric direct sources they quoted seemed to have anything to do with piracy.
Out of curiosity, is copyright infringement a civil matter instead of a criminal matter in all EU member states? I only ask because I thought there were some EU member states where copyright infringement was explicitly not a legal violation, civil, criminal, or otherwise.
Sounds less clickbaity, I see why they went with it’s the current title 🙃
And you were doing so well, EU
Everyone will start saying "Fuck copyright" soon.
One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.
This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.
Some of us have been saying that for years
The purpose of the state is serving capital, not people.
I can't even buy a movie anymore, so if I want to keep it I need to pirate.
How do I copyright myself and I every last bit of content that I create?
Any work you create is probably under copyright automatically, if your country is party to the Berne convention.
This is actually a great question, in the context of the Fediverse.
Usually, every social network or forum has in their ELUA that anything you post is theirs, and you can't do anything about i.e Reddit using your data to train AIs.
Hlwever, here, we're on private instances of regular people. We can make our own rules, can't we? If an instance would say that anything you post is copyrighted by the author, i.e by CC, would it be enforcable if someone would decide to scrape (or repost) the content for profit?
It's not theirs. What you grant them is a non-revocable permanent worldwide license to use the content.
This is mostly necessary for the service to function, which is why it never really got pushback in the "early days" when communities were more tech literate. You need to be able to serve the content to users, and to a lesser extent being able to share popular active discussion topics is a big part of enabling the service to form communities.
What clearly isn't necessary is the "non-revocable" part. People should be able to delete their posts, and excluding for the purpose of moderation, have them removed. What also would be part of an "ethical" platform (to me), is a clear restriction in purpose to that license. I would limit my rights to the ability to use the content for the purpose of providing the "forum"(/whatever), moderation, and sharing public posts/comments to attract people to the community. But that's something that isn't trivial to write a contract for, and it is worth noting that unless they gave away DMs (which is extra awful), all of this content was deliberately public.
You could, as a host of an instance, have mostly whatever terms you want. The code is open source and it's not typical for open source licenses (including the GPL) to restrict things like that (you could probably structure a license that qualified as open source to prevent you from doing abusive things to end users of a service, but restricting how you serve it at all is unusual).
Fuck this is setting precedent to break open VPNs
Guys and gals, use I2P. Make systems that are built upon it to make it faster and more diverse. If it becomes as popular as torrents nowadays, we won't have to fear slow speeds and takedowns, nor courts or police - unless they make using anonymous networks a crime...
Sweden's on their way to doing that. They're looking into making encrypted chats illegal...
Or Tenfingers sharing protocol.
GUI in the works...
Encryption, takedown safe, etc.
ITT: people who apparently think the only online crime is copyright infringement.
Permanently Deleted
Exactly what they want: full control.
Should we ban all encryption because there could be Disney movie quotes hidden in your data?
What a shit take.
@Flatworm7591 oh thank fuck for that. oh geez it is such a relief to see these institutions workin on some common sense.