EU Court Says Hotspot Owners Aren't Liable For 3rd-Party Piracy 49
Mickeycaskill writes: A preliminary ruling from a European Court of Justice Advocate General has said it is not reasonable for owners of public Wi-Fi hotspots to be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users on these networks. Sony took legal action against a German business owner after a third party allegedly illegally downloaded music to which the record label owned the rights to on the basis the network should have been secured. However this view has been rejected by the Advocate General who says it is impossible for all public Wi-Fi to be secured. His recommendation will now be debated by European judges.
I agree (Score:2)
Third party hotspot providers should not be liable for stopping piracy. Anymore then being liable for hackers who use a hotspot to attack other devices. The only exception to this, is when the hotspot provider could be shown to aid or provide direct assistance in obtaining pirated content. If your simply provided access to the internet, you cannot possible be held responsible to know what ever user of that access point is doing.
Re: (Score:2)
Please feel free to send this message (preferably in German) to the FINE German government which thinks that hotspot providers should be held liable. I guess, Germany is the only ba^H^H country on earth which has such a FINE law. However, for the present German government, the Internet is the "undiscovered country".
Little people, I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, operating a hotspot for the benefit of your business off the cheapest 'home' internet plan may be a breach of your ISP's ToS; but that's a totally separate issue, to be taken up between you and them if they care so much, and not relevant to your culpability for what 3rd parties do on your hotspot.
Re:Little people, I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
More or less everyone accepts that ISPs, telcos, and the like can't possibly be held responsible for every last dumb or criminal thing that their customers do or we'd have to shut down basically everything
No... adult rational people accept this. Lawyers of media companies such as Sony do not accept this, and they would like to be able to sue ISPs over it, at least if they cannot easily "recover" $$$ and cease-and-decist from the end-user.
Re:Little people, I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
When the cure is worse than the disease, rational people just learn to live with the disease. The entire global music industry only makes about $15 billion/yr in revenue (movie industry is about $88 billion/yr). Yet they've got the government doing backflips to accommodate them imposing all sorts of crazy restrictions on the $100 billion/yr search industry, $400 billion/yr software industry, $500 billion/yr ISP industry, $1 trillion/yr electronics industry, and now the $500 billion/yr hotel industry and $3.5 trillion/yr restaurant industry. When the bug gets too annoying, you'll find it's easier to squash it than to try to be nice and allow it to live.
Re:Little people, I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to remember that the media people are stuck in the 20th century. For example, in the UK if a business has a radio for staff, they must ensure that that the public can't hear it because that would require a licence. If there is a back office the door must be closed and the volume kept low enough that customers out the front can't hear it, and the BPI will send people round to check. It's that stupid.
So from their point of view, offering a service like wifi that makes the cafe more attractive to patrons but also allows them to pirate music means that the cafe owner must be liable. It's nonsense of course, but they can only think in 20th century terms and concepts like being a "carrier" only apply to other huge corporations, not peons.
Re: (Score:2)
While you are technically correct it's not actually the law in the UK . The PRS are the people who will come round and check (not the BPI) and they're not so much a licensing authority as a club that most of the artists, bands, labels etc are members of. It's basically a protection racket dressed up in shiney clothes. If you limited your musical output to non-PRS-registered artists then TECHNICALLY you wouldn't need a PRS license. Technically is in capital letters, because you are little people and they are
Re: (Score:2)
Well the former case at least involves intentionally using the music, which you can resolve using the off button. The latter is more like being charged with aiding copyright infringement selling blank CDs because the customer might make pirated copies. I hope he wins, because it's really a bizarre law.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good to see this (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not about child porn anyway, just about the content mafia.
Re: (Score:2)
This point is debatable, considering some of the content pushed.
Re: (Score:3)
You'll see it right in TFS:
"...has said it is not reasonable for owners of public Wi-Fi hotspots to be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users on these networks. Sony took legal action against a German business owner after a third party allegedly illegally downloaded music..."
But why do I expect people reading the summary in first place? I guess I must be new here.
Re: (Score:2)
What is interesting is that providers need to keep connection data for two years. So if they see somebody downloading childporn from everyday at 08:07-08:09 at the stations Starbucks, it is still possible to get a court order to get more data and set up an operation to arrest the person.
I think today's criminals are smart enough to defeat this way of doing things. Heck, one has 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year! Easy to defeat in my opinion.
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The data retention requirement only applies to ISPs. Wifi operators, VPN operators, businesses with corporate networks etc. don't have to keep anything.
FTFW! (Score:3)
Because logic!
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Darling, I'm not aware of what the Polish government is doing and I actually couldn't care less, however, an intelligent ruling on a piracy case doesn't magically erase or make up for all the bad things the EU has done and is doing: the TTIP, the Maastricht rules, the Fiscal Compact, the substantial failure of the single currency, the progressive erasure of the national identities and cultures, the inability to handle the refugee crisis, and, most importantly, blackmailing Greece and Portugal into accepting
Re: (Score:2)
I hope those intelligent judges will be appointed to the national constitutional courts of their own countries.
Sadly not in the UK. Nothing to do with the fact that there is no national constitution but that the government (which is going to be Conservative for several decades after their planned boundary changes [newstatesman.com] during this session) will give the content mafia free rein to persecute citizens. Although, to be fair, a Labour government would probably be as supine to the content mafia.
This is why the UK Gov want to leave the EU (Score:1)
Or at the very least (because financial institutions want to stay in the EU because it's profitable) change the rules so that the UK can ignore the EU court rulings. Because the UK government don't WANT to have these sensible rulings from people they can't pressure. Judicial appointments in the UK are candies to hand out to "responsible bodies" who will do the right thing by them.
It's also why both labour and conservative want to remove the HoL, and why Tony Blair salted so many peers into the HoL (and the
A bit of nitpicking... (Score:3, Informative)
A bit of context (Score:5, Informative)
The case that got escalated to the EU court is as described in the blurb, but it's not a new situation at all. It got escalated because Sony sued "the wrong guy", a Pirate Party member and Freifunk activist who didn't just cave when Sony's lawyers demanded 800 EUR because someone had shared music via his open wireless network. The concept is called "Störerhaftung", which means that while you're not liable for the copyright infraction as such, you are liable for the hazard created by operating the Wifi in a way that doesn't prevent the infraction. This concept is the reason why publicly accessible Wifi is a rarity in Germany, and mostly operated by large ISPs, whereas public hotspots are ubiquitous in other European countries. The current "solution" that is used by Freifunk and many other hotspot operators is to tunnel all traffic from the Wifi hotspot through a VPN provider in a different country that doesn't have this liability-by-proxy concept (usually the Netherlands). This way the traffic isn't traced back to the operator of the Wifi hotspot and the lawyers can't collect hundreds of Euros for sending a letter, as they have been doing for at least 10 years. Angela Merkel's party is still fighting to keep public Wifi as useless as possible by requiring all sorts of hoops that a hotspot operator has to jump through to be exempted from being liable by proxy. So, this is not Germany leading the EU to enlightenment. It's one guy in Germany trying to force Germany to catch up to its neighbors.
Re: (Score:3)
The case that got escalated to the EU court is as described in the blurb, but it's not a new situation at all. It got escalated because Sony sued "the wrong guy", a Pirate Party member and Freifunk activist who didn't just cave when Sony's lawyers demanded 800 EUR because someone had shared music via his open wireless network. The concept is called "Störerhaftung", which means that while you're not liable for the copyright infraction as such, you are liable for the hazard created by operating the Wifi in a way that doesn't prevent the infraction. This concept is the reason why publicly accessible Wifi is a rarity in Germany, and mostly operated by large ISPs, whereas public hotspots are ubiquitous in other European countries. The current "solution" that is used by Freifunk and many other hotspot operators is to tunnel all traffic from the Wifi hotspot through a VPN provider in a different country that doesn't have this liability-by-proxy concept (usually the Netherlands). This way the traffic isn't traced back to the operator of the Wifi hotspot and the lawyers can't collect hundreds of Euros for sending a letter, as they have been doing for at least 10 years. Angela Merkel's party is still fighting to keep public Wifi as useless as possible by requiring all sorts of hoops that a hotspot operator has to jump through to be exempted from being liable by proxy. So, this is not Germany leading the EU to enlightenment. It's one guy in Germany trying to force Germany to catch up to its neighbors.
They've been using this to blackmail small businesses for years. I staid at a hotel in Austria which did not offer WiFi. When I asked them why the manageress said they got taken to the cleaners for several thousand euros over some idiot who bittorrented copyrighted crap over their WiFi. This sentence should have been passed years ago. Making WiFi operators pay content owners damages for the activity of bittorenters on their network is like punishing municipalities for the fact that smugglers are transportin
RIP Störerhaftung? (Score:1)
Wrong /. summary: The Court didn't say anything, an Advocate General did. I don't know if even calling it a "ruling" as TFA does is correct. It's an Opinion and the Court may or may not follow it (p=0.8 [out-law.com]).
But if they do follow it, does this override national regulations such as German fucking Störerhaftung? And what about the legal enforcement of "captive portals" for free Wifi that break HTTP and are just impossible for HTTPS and non-web services (email etc.)?
More background (Score:1)
The link in the article seems unrelated (other than it's also about alleged "piracy"). The Register [theregister.co.uk] has some better background on the current case. It's about a Munich Pirate Party member who offers unencumbered free wifi in his audio/lighting store.
Router (Score:2)
As all my devices could still work it often took me a while to notice.
As I lived in a built up area, who knows what others were downloading on my unsecured WiFi hotspot?
Should I be liable for
A good ruling...
Re:Router (Score:4, Funny)
Should I be liable for /all/ of it??
Of course you should be held liable. By your own admission you knew of the problem and didn't fix it. End of story.
Just for you to understand: a safe harbor situation happens only the the Internet access provider takes place to track access: either individual logins + passwords or tracking activity and storing the logs for N years. Absent such measures the access provider is liable for actions originating from his/her access point.
So if it's your property, you should protect it? (Score:1)
Fairy snuff. Then this "Intellectual property" which belongs to Sony needs to be protected by Sony, not by the Wifi owner.
Sony, protect "your property" from being listened to. Lock it up, like all valueables you don't want stolen and don't make copies, because that just multiplies what you're supposed to be protecting.
What? You can't make money if you don't sell your copies? Well sell your copies, then. But those copies belong to the person who bought it.
What? You can't let them own it because they'll make
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That's US law. In the EU there is only a requirement for ISPs to monitor users, other providers (wifi, VPN etc) don't need to keep any data.
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In the EU there is only a requirement for ISPs to monitor users, other providers (wifi, VPN etc) don't need to keep any data.
In the EU, there is no requirement of data retention at all any more – there was, for some years, but this was struck down by the CJEU in the Digital Rights Ireland [europa.eu] case.
However, the European directive would have covered providers of Wi-Fi services: it uses the term "publicly available electronic communications services". (Article 3(1) directive 2006/24/EC [europa.eu]).
This definition comes from the telecommunications regulatory framework – Article 2 directive 2002/21/EC [europa.eu] defines "electronic communicati
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public roads are owned by the state.
Damn record labels (Score:3)
I think the moral of the story is that the RIAA, Sony, Columbia, etc don't care where the money comes from, just as long as they money comes in.
Besides, it's not like the artist would see a dime of the settlement if it ever came to pass.
This is why the music industry is fucked.
Source: I'm a musician.
TOR exit node? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm oblivious to EU laws and precedent regarding this, but I wonder if this case would have an (positive?) legal implications for TOR exit node operators...
The most interesting part of the opinion, in my view, was the clear statement that someone offering free public Wi-Fi to their customers did so as part of the "economic context" of their shop, even though they do not charge directly for it.
The reason why this is important is that the shielding law in question here — Art. 212, directive 2000/31/EC [europa.eu] — can be invoked only by those providing an "information society service". This is defined as:
"any service normally provided for remuneration, at a distance, by means of electronic equipment for the processing (including digital compression) and storage of data, and at the individual request of a recipient of a service"
As you'll have noticed, to be protected, the service