Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important
Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important
A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was wheth…
The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.
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.
This is so stupid since several thousand devices can use one IP address. NAT exists.
If I download music in a Starbucks, can they fine the Starbucks CEO then?
Anyway I hope I hope online artists, and authors are able to use this to sue AI companies for stealing their copyrighted works.
A good question… I suggest we all start torrenting new release movies and video games exclusively through Starbucks, because I want to know
You may bet your bollix on ("rest assured" in non-Dublin English) them having torrents blocked on their free WiFi.
MAC addresses serious have to be spoofed.
If I download music in a Starbucks, can they fine the Starbucks CEO then?
This sounds like the kind of grassroots activity I might be interested in.
The background is that French law requires ISPs to retain the IPs of their customer for some time. That way, an IP address can be associated with a customer.
If I download music in a Starbucks, can they fine the Starbucks CEO then?
A CEO is an employee. You generally can't sue employees for this sort of thing. It may be possible to sue the company as a whole for enabling the copyright infringement, but that's not to do with this case. Perhaps in the future, operators of WiFi-hotspots will be required to use something like Youtube's Content ID system.
Anyway I hope I hope online artists, and authors are able to use this to sue AI companies for stealing their copyrighted works.
They can use this to go after "pirates". It's got nothing to do with AI.
Starbucks can be pressured to require your personal information to connect to WiFi.
Starbucks in the US have asked me to create a login to use their WiFi already. I'm in the US. I guess half way there already.
Ask for thr PW one day and dont connect and then connect from a nearby location another day.
Anyway I hope I hope online artists, and authors are able to use this to sue AI companies for stealing their copyrighted works.
No no no no, this is part of the trickle down economics we've been promised for decades. It only works going down, not punching up.
lmao copyright isn't important
if copyright were abolished worldwide today, we'd be in a happier place. people who buy things generally want to buy from the official source anyway, those official sources might even have to cut prices or (god forbid!) have to make their services better to compete in the market
I don't want to see a end to copyright. I want it restored to what it was. Where the creator had a copyright for limited amount of time then everyone had a copyright to the work.
Now that time is beyond the amount of time that someone inspired by a copyrighted work could create some derivative of it. Unless you think someone inspired as a child would feel like bringing that inspiration to fulfilment as an elderly adult is going to happen often.
Humanity as we know it existed for ten of thousands of years without copyright. Copyright is the anti-thesis to creation. Everything humans create is iterative. Copyright along with the rest of intellectual property seeks to pervert creation for personal gain.
Art does not need copyright to survive and I would argue that intellectual property is not needed to promote the arts or science. It is designed to do the opposite which is limit creation to the benefit of the individual.
What makes this worse is the individual is now the corporation. Do you know that a lot of successful artists, particularly musicians, don't even own their own works?
Corporations benefit disproportionally by copyright. They have lobbied for decades to further pervert the flawed intention of copyright and intellectual property to the breaking point. Simply put, going down the road of trying to prove who created what was first is wrong.
Creation does not happen in a vacuum. Pretending that we create is isolation is farcical. We are great because of all those that came before us.
The telephone was invented by multiple people. The Wright brothers had European counterparts. These issues around intellectual copyright are a lot more complex than we are ready to admit.
We have billions of people now. Stop trying to pretend any idea, drawing, tune, or writing is unique. Rude wake up call, it is not.
I don't, it's not the 18th century and the industrial revolution. Copyright had a time and place and that isn't the here and now. We are worse off for copyright and patients today. Today they enshrine wealth and are a tool to prevent progress and inflate cost.
cut prices
There you have your answer to the question you didn't ask, but you know what I mean
I know right? The very idea of copyright is so fucking abstract, absurd and far-fetched. For the most part, it amounts to:
"NOOOOO YOU CAN'T PLACE THE ATOMS IN THIS ORDER BECAUSE ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE YOU!!!11!1!1!" (When it comes to scientific or engineering parents)
"NOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE A SURFACE REFLECT THE PHOTONS LIKE THAT, OR EMIT THEM IN THAT PATTERN. THE RIGHT TO DO THAT BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!!!1!!1!" (When it comes to pictoric arts)
"NOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE THE AIR VIBRATE AT THOSE FREQUENCIES IN THAT PATTERN, SOMEONE DID IT BEFORE YOU AND THEY'RE PAYING ME SO YOU CAN'T DO IT TOO!!!" (Music)
"NOOO YOU CAN'T PUT LETTERS IN THAT ORDER!! THAT'S ILLEGAL, ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE!!" (Text and code)
So yeah, fuck that shit
Copyright protects creators and prevents monopolies from abusing the system. Imagine you write a movie to sell and Amazon steals that exact movie but uses their resources to market it as their own and sell over seas.
You tell me in what world that sounds fair. Only a moron thinks a free market economy actually works.
Another example is assuming companies act in good faith to protect the market. History has shown that not only do corporations NOT care about rules and regulations but they actively act in the interests of investors and profits.
It is up to the courts to fix the abuse of the current copyright system and unfortunately they also act in the interests of profits.
Becoming better at technology is the gateway to fucking with copyright. As if they're going to be able to do shit when I torrent their files over some obscure server in the developing world to over here. Fuck copyright and companies who engage in that. Every game, all kinds of media and intellectual property that these companies own should be stolen from them and distributed freely. This should then be followed by severe cyber attacks on said companies to destroy their infrastructure to the extent that they can never hold creations of artists for themselves. Fuck corporate enslavement of artists and creators. I'd much rather pay $200 a month to be distributed directly to artists than pay a single cent for a game/album provided by Microsoft/Spotify (as an example). Now, some companies are better than others. GOG until recently was something I liked (conceptually anyway, since I don't play games), and Qobuz and Tidal pay their artists better than most. I am OK with these companies. The likes of Amazon and Spotify and Microsoft should be destroyed so badly that they can no longer function in this space. We should spread the word of piracy and digital freedom away from these bastards.
Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.
That already happens. People who research normally do it under a wage and the invention goes to the company paying the wage. If not, a small inventor doesn't have the financial means and the lawyers to fight a big company copying their idea. The small person is never defended.
Someone has never seen Aliexpress..
Copyright died when information became easily accessible. It's only propped up by those who stand to profit immensely from it. The rest of us not only do not profit from it, it harms us.
If copyright was abolished overnight, then the corporations with enough money would control everything. The chance for an individual creator to create and control their unique art would disappear. Works of art and entertainment would forever be controlled by giant corporations.
If copyright were abolished, all FOSS and Creative Commons licenses would be rendered null and void, since they depend on copyright law to work.
A take. Presented to you by an edgy teen.
Lol yeah.
Good luck spending time and money investing in something that you know will have zero legal protection as 'yours' after you go to market.
I personally feel that a copyright does give confidence to product developers to actually develop products. If they felt they weren't going to get anything for their work they just wouldn't bother and our tech advancement would stall significantly.
If copyright is sacrosanct then the creation of data by me is my own personal property and without a contract anyone holding my data is in violation.
Afraid to upvote this in case someone later attempts to prove I viewed this data with my eyes
Every single person in the EU needs to sue on these grounds.
Also fuck this corporatist statist bullshit. Why the fuck do people keep voting in authoritarians?
Cause for making an authoritarian change it's sufficient to vote once, to revert it is voting in the situation created by it. It's a logical OR in their favor.
And it makes perfect sense that a big centralized state and putting rule of law above pride cause this.
It's like the "computer that you can't throw out of the window" quote. A government you can't change via riots is a bad government. A republic is about rule of people, not of stamped toiled paper with rules on it. The good French rioting tradition is also from this.
Rule of law should never be put above common sense and pride.
In a couple of decades the 2A crowd in the USA will become better understood by Americans and Europeans, I think.
I can relate to the sentiment, but that just makes it worse. How do you enforce ownership of data?
There's only 1 thing for it: More internet surveillance.
The gdpr allows processing of personal data under a few circumstances and contracts are only one of them.
I really don't see how this doesn't conflict with GDPR.
GDPR has plenty provisions where other laws or considerations may be more relevant than it, negating it in such cases.
I still do think the GDPR is extremely important, but it is no silver bullet,sadly.
Great... so we're reaffirming that society's various structures exist purely for the benefit of monied interests, as ever. Any benefit the regular person sees from arrangements is purely coincidental, your rights stop at the point at which a corporation needs them to.
Property rights being valued above human rights is kind of a mainstay of capitalism.
Property rights are part of human rights.
This situation is about preventive protection of someone's rights warranting real violation of your rights.
It's a clear violation of status quo, it's absolute bullshit, and the officials responsible for this should all spend quality time in jail answering questions about mafia organizations they are affiliated with, and then be flogged on TV, with a lifetime prison sentence after.
Copyright imbues the creation with a level of uniqueness that is greatly exaggerated
Given a set of facts & tools people will come to similar or identical conclusions
So What?
Should that entitle you to be a gatekeeper forever?Humans have an urge for legacy. Legacy is probably the most destructive of human traits, it manifest as hoarding a bunch of resources, having as many children as possible, being noticed, being "famous". The last two are having your legacy NOW
Legacy is self preservation exaggerated to extremes
Lets see Courts opinion on
AILLMs.Hold on, let them check their bank accounts first.
I feel like we're rapidly moving into a world where a regular person copying anything from a corporation results in summary execution by the copyright police but the corporations can scoop up literally every single piece of content we create without consiquence.
This is the basic idea, yes. :(
It doesn’t seem like the ruling says copyright concerns justify overriding a right to anonymity under GDPR, but that the right to anonymity doesn’t exist in the first place.
I think that’s probably a better place to be, because it means they can legislate a right to anonymity.
The EU and the digital world: sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. In Spanish we say 'una de cal y otra de arena'.
That translates to "one of lime and the other of sand". I don't understand. Can you explain?
Fuck there aint
Top me court says this is not enforceable bar real totalitarian state. EDIT: Also fuck them children of crowd.
They're working on it.
You are clearly a corporate shill so I’m not going to bother responding to any of your bad faith arguments. Your entire comment can be summed up by saying you don’t believe anything a person makes belongs to them. I hope your life in Russia or China is enjoyable.
This has to be a copypasta
What am I missing, here? If you do something illegal, they can try to find out who you are? So if the girl I am currently cyberstalking were to go to the police, they could work with my ISP to figure out who I am?
I'm going to move to a VPN pronto!
I guess you subscribe to the theory that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide? Better hope you have the right state sanctioned religion when a right wing government takes over some day.
Just to back you up:
https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters
“The most common argument used in defense of mass surveillance is ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’. Try saying that to women in the US states where abortion has suddenly become illegal. Say it to investigative journalists in authoritarian countries. Saying ‘I have nothing to hide’ means you stop caring about anyone fighting for their freedom. And one day, you might be one of them.”
What am I missing, here?
Well, for starters, you seem to be missing anything resembling a coherent argument... 🤪
And reading comprehension.
Just tell the judge she may have violated your copyright and you can stalk her all you want.
is cyber'stalking' even illegal? there's something incredibly harmless about scrolling thru someone's instagram that showing up outside their house repeatedly doesn't seem to compare with
Stalking is always a crime, and has a specific legal definition. For the federal level in the US per 18 U.S.C. § 2261A:
The statute specifies that it is illegal to engage in conduct with the intent to kill, injure, harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance with the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person, where such conduct:
Places that person in reasonable fear of the death of, or serious bodily injury to: That person;
An immediate family member;
A spouse or intimate partner of that person; or
A pet, service animal, emotional support animal, or horse of that person; or
Causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to: That person;
An immediate family member;
A spouse or intimate partner of that person; or
A pet, service animal, emotional support animal, or horse of that person.
Scrolling through their social media is not stalking, unless you plan to harass or harm the person.
What is colloquially called stalking, isn't actually stalking. Stalking involves a level of fear by the stalked party [or a level of intended harm by the stalking party].
[Edit] to include a little more clarification.