'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

Posted by healsdata 2 hours ago

'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling(www.techradar.com)

186 points | 23 comments

sebastiennight 1 hour ago|

For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:

This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.

It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.

But, still:

> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?

> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.

Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.

petcat 1 hour ago|

Somewhat related to this same debate on censorship:

French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]

> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.

After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.

It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...

spiderfarmer 30 minutes ago||

I don’t think it’s crazy to enforce laws, especially given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.

VWWHFSfQ 17 minutes ago||

> given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.

They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.

They just want their share.

lokar 9 minutes ago||

They want them to follow legally enacted laws in an open democracy.

kps 1 hour ago||

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

Retric 57 minutes ago|

People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.

What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

eikenberry 44 minutes ago||

I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.

EmbarrassedHelp 1 hour ago||

Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.

shevy-java 1 hour ago|

Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)

Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:

"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."

This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.

merb 1 hour ago||

Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material

ryandrake 1 hour ago||

The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago||

That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.

skinfaxi 1 hour ago||

Is it a design or implementation flaw?

phendrenad2 23 minutes ago||

Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.

shevy-java 1 hour ago||

That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future, otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that field for your age: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 - Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago||

EU posts about it:

Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]

https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...