Germany Set To End Copyright Liability For Open Wi-Fi Operators 46
An anonymous reader writes: People who travel to Germany are often surprised at the lack of public, open Wi-Fi networks. That's because German law holds operators of public hotspots liable for everything their users do online, especially when these actions are against the law, and even if the operators weren't aware of them. The law doesn't apply to commercial operators, but does to private (think home WI-Fi's) and small operators (e.g. wireless networks set up by public establishments like coffee bars, shops, etc.). But, there's more than a good chance that this clause of the law will be repelled this year, and hopefully, open Wi-Fi networks in Germany will mushroom as a result.Copyright trolls, who make money by sending invoices to people claiming that their content has been infringed, will not be pleased.
Re:Repealed (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, the whole submission is in German, so any correct English is purely accidental, anyway.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That's what she said.
Time to open up! (Score:3)
...a guest SSID on every AP coming to everything near you!
Re: (Score:2)
...a guest SSID on every AP coming to everything near you!
Just be careful with the name Wi-Fi hot spot called 'Mobile Detonation Device' delays flight [cnn.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I usually go for something more copyright friendly like "Unenforcible Free Torrenting Hot Spot!"
Copyright trolls...meaning the industry at large (Score:1)
There's only one way to deal with this. You all know what it is...
Re: (Score:3)
Pirate more music that has no reason being disseminated in the first place? IMHO any music worth listening too is already free [archive.org].
Re: (Score:2)
He's in first grayed, you insensitive clod
Re: (Score:2)
It's called a "typo." Get the fuck over yourself. Better yet, post under a UID so we can inspect your past posting for spelling.
Re: (Score:2)
In my case I was accused of file-sharing some porn film. It was a false positive but that does not make any difference under current German law, if their program says you were file-sharing then that is assumed to be the case.
Re: (Score:3)
In my case I was accused of file-sharing some porn film. It was a false positive but that does not make any difference under current German law, if their program says you were file-sharing then that is assumed to be the case.
Considering what some German porn seems to be, I'd be denying it as well.
Re: (Score:2)
It's actually worse in Germany because you don't have to own the copyright or be authorized by the copyright holder.
All you have to do is forward the money to the copyright holder in the end. So the end result is you get a bunch of rabid companies who do nothing but scan for people committing copyright infringement, then sending demand letters for compensation "acting on behalf" of the actual copyright holder.
Re: (Score:2)
And they do not even need to prove it. They make contact with the ISPs asking who had a particular IP Address at a particular time and . . . profit. If their software comes up with the wrong IP Address or they get the time wrong, it makes no difference. I think the minister who came up with that particular law was the woman who took her "official" car with her when she went to Spain on holiday - along with her driver - and the car was stolen. That happened shortly before an election and her party lost.
Show me the draft or GTFO (Score:4, Interesting)
They have pulled off this trick once already: they had said they end the liability, while in fact just making the regulations more strict and requiring stupid things like a captive portal where you have to agree to not commit crimes (WTF?!) and mandating encryption of the WiFi.
They had made a press release about "ending" liability for operators, and the whole press copy-pasted it without questioning. Then after a day or so the press started hearing about the smart people who have outlined this to them, and corrected their mistake.
They have played this game once already, and back then they even published a regulation draft. Now we only have the press release, without a draft. Show me the draft or GTFO. I won't believe them until I saw it.
In other news... (Score:2)
Copyright trolls, who make money by sending invoices to people claiming that their content has been infringed, will not be pleased.
Local rabbits, who have spent the last 60 million years evolving to live in briar patches, are said to be "Inconsolably despondent" at the prospect of being thrown into a briar patch.
Re: (Score:2)
Should all of them starve to death, all that can be said is "and nothing of value was lost".
They took Freiherr Günther von Gravenreuth as their role model. Now it's time that they go all the way and put a hole into their worthless head, too.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, there are way less people making than "consuming". So a bust catching 5000 perverts only works, if posession is illegal. ... and gets you the downloaders more often than the (very careful) uploaders.
And catching people by tracing ips is way more easy
So they get the easy ones, which make good pr, instead of the dangerous ones, which only make one headline.
Re: (Score:2)
And as a result, they catch 5000 "perverts", but not a single person that raped a child to make this stuff. (And do not forget that comic images also count, and that can only be called a though-crime.) And they rescue not a single child. They also do absolutely nothing about people raping children and not documenting it.
I think it is pretty obvious where they fail fundamental ethics here, but I admit that getting 5000 convictions instead of one is a lot more attractive to people that do not understand what
Re: (Score:2)
The question is, what do you want to protect? ... to protect humans, not to hunt down the path of some images. Except you have a real chance to find the source.
I guess you want to protect humans. And then the most important step is
Re: (Score:2)
Who cares? Nobody who saw it will tell you. You will not know. So how does it affect you? It doesn't hurt. What happend before is what hurt. And thus they should use all their power to prevent action, not existing videos. They can start to hunt for digital material, when they caught all the criminals and really have nothing to do. Until then, they should do something actually useful.
Repelled? (Score:2)
Is the law engaged in a hostile boarding action? Could the anti-piracy law, be ACTUALLY engaging in real life piracy?
Don't count on it ... (Score:2)
Knowing how botched up German laws are typically, they will find a way to mess it up ... maybe through incompetence, maybe through malice because they (or lobbyists) don't want to give up going after "bad people" ....
What's that supposed to mean? (Score:2)
"Copyright trolls, who make money by sending invoices to people claiming that their content has been infringed, will not be pleased."
Since when do hosts care what parasites think?
Re: (Score:2)
We do not. Politicians getting kickbacks do.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind kicking them back, too.
The closer to the cliff the less I'd mind.
Dragged screaming and kicking from the dark ages (Score:2)
With this change, the German conservatives are finally dragged kicking and screaming from the dark-ages of basically no public WiFi. These morons considered it far more important to "protect" copyright holders than having a decent public WiFi infrastructure, and that while claiming that high-tech will make Germany great again (yes, same style as somebody else we all know). The only reasonable explanation for that behavior is stupidity and/or bribery. Fortunately, it is over now after countries like Romania