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 🙃
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…
I can’t even buy a movie anymore, so if I want to keep it I need to pirate.
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.
Communism will start backing up piracy.
ITT: people who apparently think the only online crime is copyright infringement.
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Fuck this is setting precedent to break open VPNs
Exactly what they want: full control.
How do I copyright myself and I every last bit of content that I create?
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?
Any work you create is probably under copyright automatically, if your country is party to the Berne convention.
In Germany only stuff that has a certain level of creativity (Schöpfungshöhe) can be under copyright.
And how is that determined? I found the shit that I took this morning immensely creative.
The purpose of the state is serving capital, not people.
