German court rules in favor of file sharers

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 20 Mar 2008 4:37 User comments (4)

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file sharers must remain private and can no longer be revealed to media companies that are suing them over alleged copyright infringement. For now one, only people accused of "hard" crimes such as murder and kidnapping will have their identities revealed.

Germany is known to have some of the toughest copyright laws on the planet and some reports have indicated that over 200,000 German citizens have had their identities shared with entertainment and media companies, simply so they can be threatened with future legal action for unauthorized downloads.

Christian Solmecke, a defense lawyer, gave a more in depth look into the system before this latest ruling. “Based on the data provided by Logistep and other P2P tracking enterprises, an offense is reported. The public prosecution service is obliged to investigate because a copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Germany.” The ISP would then be forced to reveal the identity of the alleged file sharer.

The new ruling means the media companies can no longer force ISPs to reveal alleged file sharer's identities. As was noted before, the only way to get an identity for now on will be if the file sharer is also involved in terrorism, murder, child pornography or kidnapping. I'm sure many file sharers in Germany feel a lot more safe now that this ruling has passed.

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4 user comments

120.3.2008 17:44

rosedog

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WOW! Now if only we can get that passed here too.

220.3.2008 21:04

ripxrush

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Originally posted by rosedog:
WOW! Now if only we can get that passed here too.

uh... where is HERE?! Just had to give ya a hard time! that will never happen in the states! Those huge company's "contribute" too much to government workers during re election times to let that pass in the states!

... how many posts till i am no longer a NewB?

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 20 Mar 2008 @ 9:05

320.3.2008 21:34

logan1957

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Sounds like the only legal system around that will tell the big media companies where to go and how to get there. Wish our legal systems here in Canada and the States would have the stones to do the same thing. I still can't see how the media companies can use the tactics they do,i.e. Media Defender and Media Sentry, to get info on people when they aren't licensed to do so. I'd love to see the court system stand up and tell these greedy creeps that since they don't play by the rules and have to basically make things up to get a lawsuit going against someone that any such suits brought forth from this point on will have to have solid evidence not just the ISP address of the person. As I said before if you have a wifi connection to your laptop, someone within 1500 feet of your computer can share that connection, so if they download or upload music to the web and the greedia barons spy companies trace the ISP connection it's gonna go to you not the actual person doing the sharing. From what I've heard as of late, there seems to be a way now to prevent your wifi from being compromised but as to how to do it, is a whole nuther country.

421.3.2008 00:32

WierdName

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Originally posted by logan1957:
...As I said before if you have a wifi connection to your laptop, someone within 1500 feet of your computer can share that connection, so if they download or upload music to the web and the greedia barons spy companies trace the ISP connection it's gonna go to you not the actual person doing the sharing.

Exactly. As many may be aware, you can easily get into a WEP secured network within 10 seconds if you know what you're doing and there's enough traffic to sniff. My dad, who setup the home network, was ignorant enough to use WEP as the encryption method and it is still being used because he doesn't have time/want to deal with setting up WPA or some more secure setup. Now, I highly doubt getting hacked in this area because of being surrounded by less than computer savvy people as well of this being a more secluded street. However, it is still possible to get in to our network, and therefore, possible to use it to do illegal actions. Then, because people are ignorant enough to believe tracing the IP will give you the responsible person, any illegal action would be traced to us.

As for the news topic, good going Germany. Nice to see some common sense.

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German court rules in favor of file sharers

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