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.
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.
Are you aware it’s the case in the US too? I don’t see what is supposed to be bad or terrifying here. French regulators (why the scare quotes?) entire reason d‘être is what you frame as suspicious, but it’s pretty standard, the state governs the infrastructure in its territory
Devils advocate question: Isn't registering an ip to name essentially advertising? You're paying a registrar to return your Internet address location when searched for.
Not merely DNS names, but in IP routing, announcing a route is known as "advertising" it. You and your ISP are literally advertising a path for others to find your site via TCP/IP.
> 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.
I don't care about sports betting. I care about government blocking websites just because it exists on the internet. It was already illegal for Polymarket to accept bets from French people.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.
There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!
And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?
Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.
Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"
on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.
There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.
Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites.
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
This is hard to read, but I think you're saying the Internet will see a shift to "Sneaker Net" like tactics where people torrent stuff, store it on HDDs, and just move those HDDs around? Like they do in Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E
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.
One of the core functions of Court of Justice of the European Union (CEJU) is to perform judicial review, which means they can strike down laws. So it would not be legal to pass legislation attempting to make legal what they struck down.
Yeah silly if ruled otherwise. It would mean copyright defaults to the laggiest country since someone could throw a paper plane with the material over a border.
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.
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.
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]
> Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must determine whether the geo-blocking used by the website was state of the art and effective in practice. If so, the intended audience would not have included Dutch users, and no communication would have been made to the public in the Netherlands.
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
It seems like the article title was inspired by this sentence "By contrast, the provider of a VPN or similar services that are used in order to circumvent an ineffective geo-blocking measure and are lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use cannot be regarded as also having communicated the work to the public." I.e. if a VPN is a lawful technical tool, then the VPN provider isn't liable as the publisher of works accessible through it. That leaves open the possibility for VPNs that are not lawful or not mere technical tools to be liable.
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.
Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff
Leaving aside the fact that there are not enough octogenarians in the Commons to pass any legislation, there’s no need to for ageist statements like that.
> The UK government has officially scrapped the idea of restricting virtual private networks (VPNs) to enforce its impending social media bans, delivering a massive victory for digital privacy advocates.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
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)
> Everyone knows it's possible for a statement to be correct and vile at the same time
I really need to spend some time thinking about this one. If something is correct, I don't tend to continue analyzing it further to look for reasons to be angry.
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.
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...
Are you aware it’s the case in the US too? I don’t see what is supposed to be bad or terrifying here. French regulators (why the scare quotes?) entire reason d‘être is what you frame as suspicious, but it’s pretty standard, the state governs the infrastructure in its territory
US regulators don't order ISPs to block websites.
The FBI will seize a domain, but only after a court order.
Devils advocate question: Isn't registering an ip to name essentially advertising? You're paying a registrar to return your Internet address location when searched for.
Not merely DNS names, but in IP routing, announcing a route is known as "advertising" it. You and your ISP are literally advertising a path for others to find your site via TCP/IP.
no, that is a ridiculous line of reasoning
Not really.
Why would people pay so much for the $brand_name.com, etc if there wasn't a marketing component to it?
Having a marketable address is not advertising.
I don’t think it’s crazy to enforce laws, especially given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.
> 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.
They want them to follow legally enacted laws in an open democracy.
It's all about nuance. The gambling mafia comment is pure gold.
If you’re aware of the organization called “FIFA” you can’t believe this is true.
I responded to the wrong comment, I ment to respond to the GP.
Fifa is Swiss, not French.
I didn’t say anything about the French.
The decision was made in the context of foreign interference with elections.
So why are all 50 US states not allowing sports betting?
I don't care about sports betting. I care about government blocking websites just because it exists on the internet. It was already illegal for Polymarket to accept bets from French people.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?
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.
> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.
I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.
Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.
There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!
And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?
Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.
Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"
on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.
There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.
Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
>Really, all of them?
Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?
Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level
> People do care about income streams for their descendants
Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
If they can target us by IP for surveillance pricing etc. then we need VPN as a basic survival tool.
You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc.
Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists.
Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.
If they ever make VPNs illegal first they need to add ivanti to the list. For amount of crimes it has committed against IT Security personnel.
Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites.
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
This is hard to read, but I think you're saying the Internet will see a shift to "Sneaker Net" like tactics where people torrent stuff, store it on HDDs, and just move those HDDs around? Like they do in Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E
For the most part, I agree.
Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
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.
> Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed.
That’s the whole point. The courts uphold the law. Change the law, and the courts change what they do.
One of the core functions of Court of Justice of the European Union (CEJU) is to perform judicial review, which means they can strike down laws. So it would not be legal to pass legislation attempting to make legal what they struck down.
Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material
So much energy to prevent resourceful teenagers from watching porn?
This is about porn's cousin, money.
Yeah silly if ruled otherwise. It would mean copyright defaults to the laggiest country since someone could throw a paper plane with the material over a border.
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.
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.
There's no irony. A given name does not constitute a mandate to use it any particular way.
Is it a design or implementation flaw?
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...
Other blog post:
CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
> Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must determine whether the geo-blocking used by the website was state of the art and effective in practice. If so, the intended audience would not have included Dutch users, and no communication would have been made to the public in the Netherlands.
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
And the actual judgment: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
I find these are often very readable and interesting.
It seems like the article title was inspired by this sentence "By contrast, the provider of a VPN or similar services that are used in order to circumvent an ineffective geo-blocking measure and are lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use cannot be regarded as also having communicated the work to the public." I.e. if a VPN is a lawful technical tool, then the VPN provider isn't liable as the publisher of works accessible through it. That leaves open the possibility for VPNs that are not lawful or not mere technical tools to be liable.
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.
Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff
Leaving aside the fact that there are not enough octogenarians in the Commons to pass any legislation, there’s no need to for ageist statements like that.
> The UK government has officially scrapped the idea of restricting virtual private networks (VPNs) to enforce its impending social media bans, delivering a massive victory for digital privacy advocates.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-decide...
British Parliament only has to be lucky once. VPNs have to be lucky every time.
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)
Landmark?
It's Europe.
#3.
Pareto puts them in the insignificant 80%.
Thanks Europe for the cookie message.
It’s big businesses that want to steal your data and use it against you that put the messages up.
[flagged]
Please don't post tasteless comments like this on HN.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.
ok but is it correct or incorrect?
Please don't act like a jerk. Everyone knows it's possible for a statement to be correct and vile at the same time.
> Everyone knows it's possible for a statement to be correct and vile at the same time
I really need to spend some time thinking about this one. If something is correct, I don't tend to continue analyzing it further to look for reasons to be angry.