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Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important (www.techdirt.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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.

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[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 117 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[-] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Sounds less clickbaity, I see why they went with it’s the current title 🙃

[-] finley@lemm.ee 62 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

And you were doing so well, EU

[-] ahriboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 3 weeks ago

Everyone will start saying "Fuck copyright" soon.

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] ahriboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago

Communism will start backing up piracy.

[-] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 weeks ago

Some of us have been saying that for years

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 3 weeks ago

The purpose of the state is serving capital, not people.

[-] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 32 points 3 weeks ago

I can't even buy a movie anymore, so if I want to keep it I need to pirate.

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 31 points 3 weeks ago

How do I copyright myself and I every last bit of content that I create?

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 17 points 3 weeks ago

Any work you create is probably under copyright automatically, if your country is party to the Berne convention.

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.de 5 points 3 weeks ago

In Germany only stuff that has a certain level of creativity (Schöpfungshöhe) can be under copyright.

[-] sic_1@feddit.de 5 points 3 weeks ago

And how is that determined? I found the shit that I took this morning immensely creative.

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.de 1 points 3 weeks ago

It needs a certain level of individuality and personality of the creator that sets it apart from other, already existing works of art.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

[-] whatsgoingdom@rollenspiel.forum 4 points 3 weeks ago

Would that be a way - have lots of your self created stuff on any device and then sue the corpos or sth for gaining illegal access to copyrighted materials in case they search it?

[-] IcePee@lemmy.beru.co 2 points 3 weeks ago

For personal things, computer, phones, etc. Big corpos cover this by a EULA. EULAs also covers forums controlled by the companies. For public places like websites, you can control search engines by using a robot.txt file.

[-] Mikina@programming.dev 14 points 3 weeks ago

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?

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 8 points 3 weeks ago

Both cases the author retains copyright.

[-] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 weeks ago

So the question isn't if ordinary people can exert copyright over their content, they absolutely can.

The reason people seem unaware of this is because the crux is that other then a rare exception no ordinary person can sue a megaorg like google or meta and win. For mostly trying to find a literal army of lawyers and corrupt bureaucrats would be mental health suicide.

That’s exactly how capitalism likes it and thats how they stay on top in a position to lobby lawmakers, which is yet another thing you are definitely legally allowed to do as an individual.

[-] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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).

[-] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 3 weeks ago

Fuck this is setting precedent to break open VPNs

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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...

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