EU Court Declares VPNs Lawful Technical Tools in Landmark Anne Frank Ruling
'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
The EU Court has delivered a landmark decision regarding the Anne Frank copyright case, explicitly ruling that VPNs are lawful technical tools. This judgment clarifies that while copyright infringement remains illegal, the technology itself used to access content cannot be criminalized. The ruling sets a significant precedent for digital privacy and the legal status of encryption tools across Europe.
- 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.
- kps
Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?
- 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.
- miki123211
> The case centered on the copyright battle involving Anne Frank's diary
If there's a copyright dispute somewhere, you can bet it's either Anne Frank's estate, Tolkien's estate, or the Beatles's old record label.
It's never the authors who actually made the work. It's always their heirs.
- 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.
- jeroenhd
> However, in the Netherlands, parts of the text remain protected by copyright until 2037.
I'm not for complete copyright abolishment but this is absolutely insane. In this case, the copyright term is so long because the original copyright lasted 50 years after publication (rather than the author's death), but a change in copyright law changed that to 70 years and moved the counting date.
Regardless of legalities, taking action against distribution of Anne Frank's diary seems like the exact logical opposite of what this fund should be doing.
- EmbarrassedHelp
Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
- 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.