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Comment by rbecker | Hacker News Reader

> The bar owners were arrested under a 2006 law that technically classifies WiFi hotspot providing establishments as ISPs, and requires them to store one year’s worth of logs or connection records for anti-terrorism purposes.

I was under the impression that the European Court of Justice held data retention laws to be a violation of fundamental rights, and thus illegal:

https://www.theinfostride.com/data-retention-directive-inval...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#European_Union

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Just because the ECJ deems something illegal, it doesn't mean that local legislation is updated. It sounds a bit like that 2006 law has not been challenged in courts.

The blanket requirement in the directive was deemed unlawful, however it does not invalidates data retention legislation in member states.

Also, the media mafia in France is particularly strong and French politics are firmly in their pockets, a bit more so than in the rest of the world. Which means that they will hold on to as strict a suppression of free internet as possible, as long as possible.

This law is unrelated to the show business, a downloaded song will never warrant a court order to the ISP in the first place.

There is a separate (and very inefficient) enforcement mechanism for copyright fraud.

Don't know about France, but in Germany similar rules were of course introduced for the usual pretend reasons of child porn and terrorism. A short time later, minor crime investigations and then civil matters were added as reasons to access ISP data. So even if the law currently isn't used like that, it very soon will be and that was most probably always the intent. In Germany, accesses for copyright prosecution far outnumbered everything else, serious crime was only ever a very minor amount.

There are exemptions for regulatory purpose.

It's France, don't worry about it.

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

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