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

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 117 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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