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EU Court Says Hotspot Owners Aren't Liable For 3rd-Party Piracy
Mickeycaskill writes: A preliminary ruling from a European Court of Justice Advocate General has said it is not reasonable for owners of public Wi-Fi hotspots to be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users on these networks. Sony took legal action against a German business owner after a third party allegedly illegally downloaded music to which the record label owned the rights to on the basis the network should have been secured. However this view has been rejected by the Advocate General who says it is impossible for all public Wi-Fi to be secured. His recommendation will now be debated by European judges.
It is not a preliminary ruling per se but an Opinion registered by the General Advocate - usually the court follows his arguments but only then it will be a ruling. Nevertheless is this a great step towards a open wifi in some of the EU states. The case centers around a german law which forces you, if running a hotspot, to ensure that your hotspot is not used to violate IP (by using passwords or providing detailed logs afaik - as if that would help). But the law also determines that you can be hold liable if IP violations are committed using your hotspot without those countermeasures. That is what happened in this case as the party seeking this ruling was billed 800,- for alleged IP violations by Sony. As far as the registered Opinion goes it seems that the EU court will uphold the rights of free speech instead of hindering it by making wifi operators liable.
The case that got escalated to the EU court is as described in the blurb, but it's not a new situation at all. It got escalated because Sony sued "the wrong guy", a Pirate Party member and Freifunk activist who didn't just cave when Sony's lawyers demanded 800 EUR because someone had shared music via his open wireless network. The concept is called "Störerhaftung", which means that while you're not liable for the copyright infraction as such, you are liable for the hazard created by operating the Wifi in a way that doesn't prevent the infraction. This concept is the reason why publicly accessible Wifi is a rarity in Germany, and mostly operated by large ISPs, whereas public hotspots are ubiquitous in other European countries. The current "solution" that is used by Freifunk and many other hotspot operators is to tunnel all traffic from the Wifi hotspot through a VPN provider in a different country that doesn't have this liability-by-proxy concept (usually the Netherlands). This way the traffic isn't traced back to the operator of the Wifi hotspot and the lawyers can't collect hundreds of Euros for sending a letter, as they have been doing for at least 10 years. Angela Merkel's party is still fighting to keep public Wifi as useless as possible by requiring all sorts of hoops that a hotspot operator has to jump through to be exempted from being liable by proxy. So, this is not Germany leading the EU to enlightenment. It's one guy in Germany trying to force Germany to catch up to its neighbors.