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German Court: ISPs Must Hand Over File Sharer Info
itwbennett writes "The German Federal Court of Justice has ruled that ISPs have to turn over to rights-holders the names and addresses of illegal file sharers, but only 'if a judge rules that the file sharer indeed infringed on copyright,' said the court's spokeswoman, Dietlind Weinland. The ruling overturns two previous rulings by regional courts and is significant because the violation doesn't have to happen on a commercial scale, but applies whenever 'it is possible to know who was using an IP address at the time of the infringement,' the court said."
So, how do they know how many people live at the residence serviced by the named account? And by extension which one was using the computer at the time the alleged offence is supposed to have occurred?
ISPs have to obey subpoenas? Gosh, who would've thought that was legal?
But you can't know if someone infringed copyright unless you know all of the circumstances of the copying, including the identities involved.
There are many ways a person may not have been infringing copyright (statutory, fair-use, license, ownership, etc.) even if they were definitely involved in copying.
If you must prove that someone infringed copyright without knowing who they are first, it is an impossible standard.
Of course, I expect that this merely technical truth will be disregarded entirely.
...and perhaps we'll see the Piraten Partei hit the 20% mark in the polls, if they play their cards right and they remain the only party that will stop the witch hunt for file sharers.
A bunch of state governments and a central federal government? Interesting.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Places to _not_ have hosting services.
Something big needs to change in the way we use the internet. The concept of ISP's being the gate-keepers who double as loose hussies for Authoritaria is a dead end. Is a P2P wireless distributed internet immune from censorship and central planning possible? Do I know exactly how to do this? No. But it can be done in theory, though not without a massive tantrum from Omnicontrolus, and a few bits of austerity. This may sound silly, but if something similar doesn't happen, then I think it's just going to be a perpetual fight with incremental casualties leading eventually to death, or some pathetic and crippled version of something previously beautiful. I think some of us might take for granted how much fighting it takes just to hold on to what we have, while taking grievous blows to privacy and still losing a little here and little there in the process.
/. champion will humiliate me for admitting this.
Perhaps it's a big-headed notion, but a formidable effort toward such a schema might at least distract these ravenous fiends enough to prevent them from purging freedom from the spectrum altogether. Maybe with the help of private satellites and (I don't know yet; do you?), it is realistic enough to try. I'd rather take some blows to bloat and luxury than to freedom.
In Germany, you can be fined for having an unencrypted AP -- if someone uses it for "illegal" file sharing. It'll be the same elsewhere soon enough. And it will get worse and worse, until you can't connect without a chip up the arse or job in "intelligence". Some say "Darknets", but is that not something the ISP's could crush easily enough? I actually don't know; I'm asking.
We've had the DHS (of all agencies!) taking down domains in the US. The "UK" wants to retain all user's ISP data. The "US" wants likewise. What makes people think they aren't already? I suppose the level of patience, or passive retention of the ISPs and governments confuses some. I personally believe no data is destroyed, but I am sure a credible
I guess what I am saying, or spewing, is that it's going to take a lot development and hard work to even have a chance of things not sucking ultra badly in the future. And it's going to take a change on the same scale as their own ludicrous and grotesque proposals, but on the positive side. And their proposals are only becoming more and more insane. How insane will they get before one succeeds?
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
"most of europe does not have" which is wrong and what the GP was railing against. Instead you cocnentrated on the minutia. The fact is that that 5th amendment you seem so proud of, come mostly historically from the magna carta and UK law , hundreds of year before the US was even "discovered".
"The Fifth Amendment (Amendment V) to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, protects against abuse of government authority in a legal procedure. Its guarantees stem from English common law which traces back to Magna Carta in 1215. For instance, grand juries and the phrase due process (also found in the 14th Amendment) both trace their origin to Magna Carta."
So before you ask people to learn about history.... learn about yours. That 5th amendement you seem so proud of, comes from europe.
As long as we persevere wealth and control over others as our ultimate goal this will only become worse and worse..
The Constitution was ratified in 1787. The amendments to the constitution came some years later once they realized they forgot a bunch of shit like basic human rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution
Here in Germany, we just went ahead and included the basic human rights from the beginning.
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware
The influence of big media companies on the judicial system is exactly the reason why the German Pirate Party now has seats in 4 out of the 16 regional parliaments. My German friends say they feel oppressed by the legal harassment they face from law firms, extorting money from ordinary citizens in return for not being sued for large sums of money.
However, the information can only be given to the rights holder if a judge rules that the file sharer indeed infringed on copyright, said Dietlind Weinland, spokeswoman of the German Federal Court. The Federal Court is the highest ordinary court in the German judicial system and its decisions can only be overturned by the constitutional court.
But who is "the file sharer"? Do they have to identify who the actual sharer is before proceeding? Are they going to jump to the (not always true) conclusion that the person named on the account is the file sharer? Are there other provisions in the law to hold an account holder that is not the fire sharer accountable? Do the German courts realize that the law is still allowing the sale of a very insecure operating system in Germany?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The solution is simple: we should all have our computers infected with a botnet, so that we can put the blame on it whenever we have copyright-infringing material on our computers.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
All of that lasted 4 years, while your "started in" implies it's still the case. So unless you offer more, I'm pretty sure you haven't got the faintest fucking clue, just flag flag flag.
See this post.
An ISP can with certainty tell exactly which customer was using a specific IP at a specific time, but not who was using this customers connection. As countless verdicts around the civilized world has ruled, the owner of the connection is not defakto responsible or liable for abuse. The exact user must be determined in order to prosecute, and thus if this isn't possible no prosecution can occur.
There are multiple vectors available for abuse at any connection, from unsecured wifi, over hacked wifi to various form of unauthorized cabled access where the physical traces later was removed.
Now, as it is impossible to determine if a connection was abused by someone unauthorized at some point in the past, it is always impossible to rule out outside abuse and thus it is futile to persue the owner of the connection.
So please stop wasting the time of both the ISP, the customer and the courts. There's nothing to gain at all.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
this again is proof that hitler died but still lives on in germany
auschwitz opened their doors again for filesharers and small crimes
first the scandal with paul watson and now this
Whoever listens to Xavier Naidoo needs immediate medical attention to prevent an outbreak of dain bramage...
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
So, how do they know how many people live at the residence serviced by the named account? And by extension which one was using the computer at the time the alleged offence is supposed to have occurred?
By asking I suppose. Like if the police find a body in a house, they don't give up their enquiries just because two or more people live there. In this case :-
... they hanged the lot! But not everyone lives in some sort of squatter commune where they all share computers and a gateway to the web. They could soon narrow it to me for example, I've no doubt.
www.murderuk.com/serial_john_christie.html
You know what is wrong with Slashdot?
A news item comes along (concerning Germany) which you would think would be of great interest to Slashdotters, but after a couple of posts the discussion goes off at a tangent to become a flame war about the USA 5th amendment. This flame war I estimate accounts for about a third of all posts, but what is worse is that these float to the TOP of the discussion in threaded view because the thread takes root so early. To see comments about the news item itself you must scroll a long way down.
I think we need a variant of Godwin's Law to the effect that any mention of the 5th Amendment is the effective end of sensible discussion.
Hackers and freedom fighters alike are demanding ISPs start handing over government information; Even if they don't know it.
The less people respect the idea of IP, the more draconian enforcement you need.
I agree
The divide between the public opinion on one side and the law, the entertainment industry and their lobbyists on the other side is growing.
I agree.
What you see as a crackdown I see as desperation, as more and more obnoxious threats are required to keep the population at bay.
When is a crackdown not desperation and threats to keep the public at bay? So we are in agreement there too.
They're not winning the hearts and minds of the young generation, they're just hoping to intimidate them into not file sharing.
I agree. They're not doing much to endear themselves to the older generations either. More importantly they seem to have perverted IP to the extent where it is, as I wrote above becoming "corrosive to the very aim it was conceived to serve," where it becomes a fetter to innovation.
Most people don't kill because they feel it's wrong, not because the law says so.
As I have so often pointed out. And wouldn't it a diseased society where all that stood between us and that killer's blade was the law! Of course we are not concerned here with the people who don't break the law. But point taken, a better analogy might be the War on Drugs(tm).
The situation is like a rubber band being stretched and stretched but sooner or later it will snap.
"Once our generation takes the reins of power marijuana prohibition will end. It's only matter of time" -- me in 1979
...
You're right, I don't expect the fight to be over in 10 years, but I expect them to still be on the losing side trying to hold it all together.
You agree. Well we're in agreement then.** :)
[**With the small caveat that I'm not ready to conclude that they really are on the "losing side," much as they like to cry poor.]
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke