German Court Decisions Make Everyday Use Of The Internet Increasingly Risky There
from the but-safer-for-dinosaurs dept
Perhaps there's something about the German legal system that encourages judges to push their interpretation of the law to the limit, without any concern for whether the results of that logic are absurd. At least that is the impression you might get from two recent cases whose judgments both make use of the internet by ordinary citizens increasing fraught with legal risks.
The first involved a retired woman who was accused of downloading a violent film about hooligans. That in itself seems slightly unlikely, but nothing compared with the fact that at the time of the alleged download, the woman in question had neither computer nor wireless router, and lived alone.
Given that, you might think this was a cut-and-dried case of a mistake being made by the tracking company or ISP, since it was not physically possible for the IP address that had been assigned to her in a previous period (when she did have a computer and was online) to be used by her.
But the German judge in Munich was having none of it. As TorrentFreak reports:
The bottom line in Germany is that account holders are responsible for everything that happens on their account and if they can�t prove their innocence, they are found guilty. The woman must now pay just over 650 euros in damages to the copyright holder.
That seems an extraordinary approach, since it requires the accused to prove that something didn't happen. And if the absence of computer and wireless router isn't enough to do that, what is?
The other court case extends this extremist interpretation of copyright law to include streaming. A judge in Leipzig has ruled that even the temporary downloading involved in streaming counts as making a copy, because data packets are downloaded successively. If the material on the server is an unauthorized copy, then so is the streamed version, and the person viewing it is breaking the law (German original).
The trouble with this interpretation is that often it is not clear whether material held on a server is infringing on someone else's copyright � even for lawyers, never mind for members of the public.
So what will be the inevitable effect of this uncompromising viewpoint, if it is confirmed and enforced across Germany? Practically every site holding user-generated content will be forced to remove it or shut down completely there, since few general users will take the risk of downloading or streaming unknown materials that may be unauthorized, and that would immediately turn them into criminals. And that includes major sites like YouTube or top German startup Soundcloud, and possibly even Facebook, which might need to block all videos.
These extremist interpretations of copyright law threaten to have a chilling effect not just on online innovation in Germany -- who would risk setting up an internet company that involved any kind of user-generated content there? -- but beyond, into everyday life. It would make the use of the internet for anything other than as a medium for watching "approved" channels of "approved" content too much of a risk for much of the general population. Which, of course, is exactly what the copyright industries are striving for: a tamed, neutered Net.
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With laws like that, who needs SOPA?
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Guilty until proven innocent. Are we flirting with fascism again, Germany?
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Anyone who is against nuclear and claims to be green is an delusional.
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Where would you store them, Fukushima? I was very pro-nuclear until the disaster in Japan. Yea, they made serious errors in placing the plant, but as long as man is involved, the chance for serious error is high.
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But yes, nuclear is quite safe when implemented correctly.
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It gets better...
It's obvious. The only way to save the copyright holders is to kill the internet. Unplug before you accidentintentionally commit more thought crime.
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Re: It gets better...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
At this point, stupidity cannot apply. I think their intent is to kill the Internet.
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No, quite the reverse...
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I'd considering agreeing with this if we actually obtained registered IP addresses.
Think of it this way, if you're the registered owner of a vehicle, and it's involved in an accident, you're at least partially liable. The only exception is if your vehicle is stolen. In a nutshell, it's your car and you'd better be careful about who you let drive it.
But that's not what is happening here. First, the lady was not assigned a specific IP address. She signed up for internet service. And second, even if she did sign up for a specific IP address, she relinquished the address when she dropped the service.
This ruling is beyond asinine. It simply allows the copyright monopolies to pick IP addresses at random and collect money.
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In other words, this is exactly what they want/expect/are demanding to happen when SOPA passes....
How long before the SOPA amendment that requires Payment Providers to 'divert' funds to the 'rightful owners' of the copyrighted material (or perhaps it's already buried in there in so much leagleze that it just hasn't been spotted)....
I mean it's one thing to be able to kick your competition in the nuts when they aren't paying attention, it's even better to say, "Look over there, your payment provider is sending me all your funds." then kick em in the nuts....
ALL YOUR RECEIPTS ARE BELONG TO US (**US means MPAA/RIAA and all the other groups of Ass Hats....)
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It's actually worse than that. As I've written before, the copyright industries do not actually have competitors as they do not compete in a free market.
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> owner of a vehicle, and it's involved in an
> accident, you're at least partially liable
Umm.. no you're not. If you let your next-door neighbor borrow your truck and he runs a red light in it and smashes into someone, he's liable. You're not.
If you've got deeper pockets than he does, some lawyer might *try* and hold you liable, but nothing in either civil tort law or the traffic vehicle code would actually impose legal liability on you for the actions of someone else.
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Car analogy
You sell your car. The new owned uses it as a getaway car in a bank robbery. You go to jail.
Alternatively, you sell your house and move out, yet apparently you are still responsible for whatever goes on in that house.
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Old woman accused of piracy.
IP was once used by her.
But at the time of the alleged piracy, she had relinquished the IP...and didn't even have a computer!
Judge found her guilty, anyway.
We question the wisdom of your questioning the facts as stated, boy.
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One of several relevant facts that is not contained in the linked article. Hence, the reason for my comment.
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The facts here unless they're disproven: a woman had an ISP contract included in her phone package, then later sold any equipment that was capable of accessing the internet. As far as she was concerned, nobody was accessing the internet from her account. Without her knowledge, the connection gets used by a 3rd party and used to infringe copyright.
Rather than go after the person guilty of infringement (who appear to yet be identified), the woman who could not have committed the action has to pay excessive fines. The only defence available to her is to either prove a negative (which is impossible) or to do the work of the police and track down the actual culprit for them at great personal expense (and may also be impossible). The pirate goes scot free, and has nothing to stop him doing the same again.
In other words, it's the situation most of us warn about when discussing SOPA and 3 strikes laws, which tends to get dismissed as paranoid by pro-IP shills. Maybe it's about time people accepted there are real problems with these laws, rather than try to deflect blame on to the victim? Maybe if the pro-industry people stopped supporting such blatant cash grabs from innocent people, we'd be more sympathetic.
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A one armed pirate commits copyright infringement using the account of a retired woman. She is convicted because Judge Dredd proclaims account holders are responsible for everything that happens on their account and if they can�t prove their innocence, they are found guilty. She then vows to find the real infringer leading to one adventure after another. Bonus points if the pirate has an eye patch and a parrot.
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Though even that may not always be enough to prevent a lawsuit.
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Just because the technology hasn't been invented doesn't mean it's impossible! She could be a secret time traveler to, and obviously people form the future have lots of new tools to secretly pirate other peoples content from the Internet!
And of course you should be guilty of viewing illegal content by accident! How else can you easily get your enemies thrown into jail for breaking some stupid and pointless law? You expect a person wanting revenge to fake an entire crime just to frame their enemy? That's too much work! Besides, now we can throw that stupid judge in jail for viewing illegal content on the Internet!
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650 Euros
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Re: 650 Euros
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Dynamic IP
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Global liability?
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would be alone for a new holocaust under a different flag. I think without the help of german gestapo some behaviour of transatlantic organisations would not have been possible because lack of knowledge. Anyway after a long time of inactivity all of the symptoms are back. But we have slept so well since a long time. Why should we care about?Anyway it's just a hypothesis about how it could be. Any association is pure random.
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does anybody know, if the higher courts reversed any of the two rulings? Has there been any new rulings on these topics?
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