Report from Courthouse News
In Brief – A senior EU legal adviser to Europe’s top court has issued an advisory opinion that online publishers do not violate national copyright laws simply because users can bypass geographic restrictions using tools like VPNs. Advocate General Athanasios Rantos argued that copyright liability should depend on a publisher’s overall conduct, not on the possibility that geo-blocking measures put in place to protect copyright in some jurisdictions can be circumvented by users employing technology to appear to be in a jurisdiction where the copyright has expired. The case involves a dispute between the Dutch foundation that holds the copyright to Anne Frank’s diary, where certain versions remain protected in the until 2037, while copyright protection fully expired in several EU countries in 2016. Academic institutions that published a free online edition and used geo-blocking to restrict access in jurisdictions where copyright still applies, were sued by the copyright holder who argued that the prospect of VPN-based access made the publication of the free version unlawful in the Netherlands. Rantos rejected that view, warning that holding publishers responsible for every successful workaround would make territorial copyright impossible.
Context – The rapid proliferation of age-based online content laws is highlighting how users can employ VPN technology services to circumvent local limits. VPN usage reportedly spiked in the UK in response to the Online Safety Act and in Australia following the 16-year-old age threshold for social media. Officials in the UK and legislators in several US states trying to impose age-based social media limits are calling for legal restrictions on VPNs to stymie that work-around. VPN use is also at the heart of recent global content takedown orders X received from an Australian regulator and Canadian judge, both ruling that since local users could employ a VPN to circumvent a local content law, X needed to block the content globally. X succeeded in overturning the Australian order regarding a violent video and continues to fight an order to globally block an intimate image globally in Canadian court.