EU Court Recognizes VPNs as a Legitimate Technical Tool

The Court of Justice of the European Union has handed down a ruling being called a landmark for the field of digital rights: publishers and providers of VPN services bear no liability for copyright infringement if users employ their technology to bypass regional blocks.

The gist of the ruling

The court's key finding is simple: geoblocking is the rights holder's concern, not the VPN service's. Providers offer a neutral technical tool and are not answerable for exactly how their clients use it, including when those clients circumvent access restrictions that have been imposed. In other words, the responsibility for keeping content from “leaking” beyond the permitted region rests with whoever sets those restrictions, not with the intermediary whose technology makes it possible to get around them.

With this, the court drew a clear line: a VPN qualifies as a legitimate technical tool, not as a means of abetting infringement.

Why it matters

The ruling comes against the backdrop of an ongoing debate in Europe over the balance between protecting children online and the privacy of adults. Age-verification mechanisms, conceived in the name of “child safety,” in practice force adult users to hand over personal data in order to prove they are not children — and in doing so they undermine the privacy of everyone across the board.

It is precisely in this context that VPNs have found themselves in the spotlight. In the United Kingdom, ideas have been floated about restricting or banning such services — though without any coherent legal basis. The EU court's ruling hands a weighty argument to the opponents of such bans: if the Union's highest court recognizes the VPN as a lawful technology, attempts to brand it a tool for circumventing the law look far less convincing.

Whether this line in the sand will remain untouched within British jurisdiction is an open question: the logic of regulators does not always lend itself to prediction. But for privacy advocates the ruling has been a rare occasion for cautious optimism.

Source: Hacker News