Slashdot Mirror
Lycos Germany to No Longer Store IP Data
quaker5567 writes "The Register is carrying the story that Lycos Germany says it will no longer store dynamic IP addresses of its customers. According to the German Tele Services Data Protection and Telecommunications Act, ISPs are only allowed to store communications data for accounting purposes. Apparently, there is no requirement for German ISPs to keep a record of IP addresses. A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding that ISPs disclose the names of suspected file sharers."
I can already tell that the comments to this article might get confusing. In the interest of clarity, please use the abbreviation "IP" to refer only to Internet Protocol and its addressing scheme, not to copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and rights of publicity.
It is quite a sad state of affairs when a company does something that is popular with the people, and yet there is controversy because another company doesn't want it to be done.
Popular with the people? Popular with the Slashdot crowd perhaps, but I assure you that the populace at large could easily be convinced that this is akin to accessory to commit a crime.
While we can all hypothesize about the many ways that one can achieve anonimity on the net (of course if it was so trivial then this would be a non-issue), I personally appreciate the fact that a child-porn sharer, for instance, can easily be, as are regularly, tracked down because ISPs keep logs that can be used to track back from networks. I like the fact that the same accountability holds for emails threats, hate crimes, and so on.
It's one thing to call for a higher bar to the correlation of customer records with IP addresses (such as has been shown in Canada - the CIAA can suck it, but a warrant to investigate a child abduction will get the record pronto), and that actually seems credible and logical. It's quite another to say that to protect file sharers we should eliminate any legal accountability.
Touché my friend. Flame on, flame on. If only more people thought like you.
The real irony here is that those that liberated Germany in WW2, are now the ones that seem to be happy tossing civil rights out window.