EU Court Says File Sharers Don't Have To Be Named

Stony Stevenson writes "European Union countries can refuse to disclose names of file sharers on the Internet in civil cases, the EU's top court said. The European Court of Justice has ruled on a dispute between Spanish music rights holders association Promusicae and Spain's top telecoms operator Telefonica over Telefonica's Internet clients who shared copyright material on the Web. Telefonica argued that, under a national law based on EU rules, it only had to disclose the name of an Internet subscriber for criminal actions, not civil ones. But the court said: 'Community law does not require the member states, in order to ensure the effective protection of copyright, to lay down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings.' I wonder if this ruling will have any effect on other cases in other countries."

Comments

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[ccguy]

Community law does not require the member states, in order to ensure the effective protection of copyright, to lay down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings.

Notice the wording: Member states are not *required*... but they can, if they wish, lay down such an obligation.

I wonder if this ruling will have any effect on other cases in other countries.

Probably not. The Spanish law doesn't require telcos to disclose the requested information (actually they would get in serious trouble if they provided it to third parties without a judge involved), and the EU said that said law is ok, but other countries could have a different law and that would be ok as well.

Re:Optional for each country

[Splab]

Indeed we can, unlike the US criminal system, any evidence encountered can and will be used against you (well at least in Denmark). The Danish police did some illegal searches during the problems with "Ungdomshuset" - during those searches they found drugs (mainly cannabis) those people will be fined even though the search was illegal, they where in possession of the drugs.

Re:Optional for each country

[Weedlekin]

It depends what you mean by "the EU". Precedents aren't set by judicial decisions in the European Courts of Justice (ECJ), although it's fairly common for them to refer to prior decisions when making new ones. Not all EU member states operate in the same way however, with the UK for example still using their venerable precedent-driven Common Law that the US legal system is based on.

In Germany there is a workaround already.

[egork]

Local lawyers have already found a workaround for this obstacle. They first open a criminal case and receive the identity information from the police. Later they file the civil case.