European Court Allows Copyright Owners to Demand Open Wifi Networks be Secured
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I used to groan and add a password to my open wifi but then I saw one of the MP who actually voted the law who marveled, during a trip in S.Korea that he could connect without hassle to open wifis. "In France we always have to register, what a pain! Why do we make things complicated for ourselves?"
Reading that, I decided that open wifi respected the spirit of the law, and that stupid guy (Thierry Mariani, for those interested) could probably quoted before a tribunal to argue exactly that.
Don't let the name copyright owners fool you into thinking that this is about actual content creators. The case that in question is Sony vs. Some German Open WiFi operator. Bravo EU! Middle men with sophisticated lobbying experience can get access to user data, but actual content and platform creators can't.
It's clear to me that the EU doesn't truly care about user privacy. They just have an irrational bug up their ass when it comes to American tech companies.
I don't think it cares about anything. It's just a huge bureaucracy machine. So huge, that even if all participating agents would be rational (which we are so far away from), just a simple communication lag between people (all organizations in different countries, governments and subdivisions) would make it hard to reach any rational consensus.
I learned yesterday that the EU has a wine cellar with more than 40,000 bottles of wine in it. Why?!
Here's a list of the UK parliament's wine cellar, which has thousands of bottles of wine:
https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/foi/foi-and-eir/c...
Are you similarly outraged that the UK own 1128 bottles of coke?
But it's not the fact that they have drinks on site that surprised me. It's the vast quantity. The entire stock of all drinks including non-alcoholic drinks you point to is worth only about £30,000 vs the EU which has over 40,000 bottles of wine alone. I'd guess the value of the EU drinks cabinet is thus at least 10x great, probably more like 50x-100x greater. It's reflective of a wider problem with incredibly profligate spending on luxuries for EU staff at a time when most European governments are trying to cut their spending to manageable levels.
It's also not true that Whatsapp was banned from collecting data on its users, only that it can't share that data (most of which collected before the sale) with Facebook without explicit agreement.
Trust me, the EU is not against American companies. They're just beside the EU citizens.
No, they don't. The difference between WhatsApp and RIAA/MPAA is that US is willing to project its political might over the latter, which creates a bit of a problem for opposing them. EU is trying, but it has to be done in a careful way in order to not piss USGOV too much.
Is this true... millions? With only 80 million people in Germany, it seems like if copyright trolls were shaking down millions of people, it would more or less involve every single organization and household in the entire country.
Edit: After looking up some more data, at the peak in 2010 there were estimated around 500k of those letters and the million bar was likely crossed.
So take this with a grain of salt as both would likely overestimate.
It's also worth noting that these letters cost about 1000 Euros each, there is almost nothing you can do about them, and they require not the slightest bit of evidence that you actually did anything wrong.
"In cases involving peer-to-peer sharing of music files, the value of the claim was regularly set at €10,000 per file by the rights-holders...Recipients of Abmahnungen often pay the costs without consulting a lawyer, or negotiate a settlement themselves. There is a noticeable tendency to pay rather than challenge the claim..."
and
"the evidence collected about the infringement will only identify the IP...This IP address needs to be matched against the subscriber to whom it was allocated at the time of the infringement...by way of a judicial disclosure order...[in which] German courts are rather reluctant to engage in an assessment...[for instance] within 9 months in 2009, 2824 disclosure orders were sought in Cologne alone, each relating to several hundreds of IP addresses."
[1]-The RedTube copyright infringement affair in Germany: shame on who? (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600869.2015.10...)
It's bad but on the other hand I also do understand copyright holders who see their product being used for free without receiving payment in return.
It's a grey area in most countries because so many people (me including) do this that laws become basically unenforceable. It's not surprising that Germany is one of those countries where this can be enforced.
One thing that these lawyers like to do is to target people downloading porn, because very few of them are going to fight back on that risking that it gets publicly known what kind of porn they are into.
With these logs they approach the ISP's to give them names and addresses which the ISP's are forced to do.
So it's easy to see how they automated the whole process, which is a precondition if you want to go after hundreds of thousands of file sharers.
I am not sure what happens with universities and large organizations.
I've seen an article here linked yesterday where the EU will make it mandatory for WiFi networks to use password authentication. So when you say how about people that have dynamic IP's or how about people that only access public WiFi networks the government will always find a solution by passing a law that restricts access to those who have authenticated (and therefore made themselves trackable in some way)
These restrictions are never implemented for your own safety but instead they claim it is for the safety of the businesses providing these services. How is it for the safety of these businesses? It's because the government implements a framework which makes ISP's and public WiFi network providers liable for damages caused by their users.
So the government has a problem in its never ending quest for more power caused by people doing stuff they don't want them to do (and frankly, in the case of the Internet it is by nature very often exchange of some kind of information or knowledge) so they create liability issues for businesses that enable their users to do these things.
After that file hosters (e.g. Rapidshare) became popular, where only one person is uploading and the downloaders are hard to identify and even harder to sue.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel...
I wonder if his wifi is still open.
> password-protecting the internet connection, provided that those users are required to reveal their identity in order to obtain the required password and may not therefore act anonymously
The whole question by the way was not settled by the court but referred back to lower instances and is not something that will have to be answered uniformly across the EU. The court merely found that such a law would be allowed under EU rules.
If the requirement is just to have the user reveal their personal identity before using the network, and nothing is said about keeping that info afterwards, then something like this would be possible: ask the user for their personal info, handle them a hash that would work as a password to reconnect to the network within a short time window, and past this time forget said hash and the user info.
Could this work? (IANAL.)
(I think it is a terrible idea to require this; however, chances are any scheme like the one you are proposing will be shot down in flames once the WiFi owner is dragged into court.
If you require a username and password to access, then sure, you could track who is visiting what websites (provided you don't allow guest/guest like my high school did).
You see, if the WiFi network is truly open, then client-to-access point traffic is open and can be sniffed by other clients on the network. But if the network is secured, even trivially as above, then each client's connection to the access point is individually encrypted and cannot be sniffed.
That means, if you needed any password to join the network, you needn't fear the questionable critter with the MBP in the corner (unless he's hacked the store's ISP or upstream from there).
IMO this is wrong at so many levels.
So now we have a bunch of rules that only apply if you something to stop it, but it doesn't really matter if that is actually effective, and how much that something hurdle is depends on what court or politician you ask. Maximum uncertainty for small operators, so it's mostly a few larger commercial operators and some enthusiasts with VPNs. And a lot of places without wifi that would have it in other countries.
Evil tongues claim that they just want to protect T-Mobile’s business, being corrupt.
Luckily, on state level that’s not yet an issue, the parliament of Schleswig-Holstein just approved a test project of running some Freifunk nodes on/in public buildings, and a local company has started putting up free hotspots everywhere in Kiel.
I hope pressure and organization from state or city level will help somewhat. Public organisations can provide similar shields as the commercial providers do right now, and once somebody makes a state look stupid the federal level will have more of an incentive to fix it.
Disagree with EU policies? Shut up and tolerate it. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/l...
Arbitrary circuit breakers added to circumvent dissenting opinions. Article 7 TEU. "Far-reaching sanctions" can be exerted, and a country can be stripped of all voting rights in the EU and have funding blocked. In January this year, Frans Timmermans, the first ever unelected Commission "vice president," who is in charge of "human rights," triggered the mechanism for the first time against Poland’s government which came to power in a record-breaking, landslide election in 2015. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/effective-justice/rule-of-law/in...
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." ― George Washington. Or more recently, led straight into the gas chambers for a nice "hot shower."
We must ask ourselves what is the end game here? Dissenting opinions are now often twisted into being labeled as "hate speech" and "racism." Europe has already experienced the suppression of free thought and expression with the fall of the Roman Empire. What followed was a chilling effect which lasted 1000 years. Do we want to go down this road again?
Like, I don't know, the ruling against Apple and the IE government. Was that in favour of the ruling elite minority?
The EU has a lot of problems to fix within itself, but it has a decent track of evidence against your claims (user privacy, antitrust, etc).
And you completely lost it when you start mentioning the gas chambers. Dude, I don't know, but you're going too far.
Don't downvote if you don't understand the context of a comment.
Seeing terms of agreement for a wifi network is a bad enough sign.
frankly, they don't need an "open" wifi network to get whatever data they might be interested in.