alt.hn

7/21/2026 at 7:43:59 PM

'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-anne-frank-copyright-ruling

by healsdata

7/21/2026 at 8:18:46 PM

For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:

This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.

It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.

But, still:

> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?

> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.

Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.

by sebastiennight

7/21/2026 at 8:45:51 PM

Somewhat related to this same debate on censorship:

French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]

> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.

After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.

It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...

by petcat

7/21/2026 at 9:16:09 PM

I don’t think it’s crazy to enforce laws, especially given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.

by spiderfarmer

7/21/2026 at 9:29:57 PM

> given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.

They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.

They just want their share.

by VWWHFSfQ

7/21/2026 at 9:37:26 PM

They want them to follow legally enacted laws in an open democracy.

by lokar

7/21/2026 at 9:54:09 PM

It's all about nuance. The gambling mafia comment is pure gold.

by sam_lowry_

7/21/2026 at 9:55:08 PM

If you’re aware of the organization called “FIFA” you can’t believe this is true.

I responded to the wrong comment, I ment to respond to the GP.

by irishcoffee

7/21/2026 at 8:45:12 PM

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

by kps

7/21/2026 at 8:49:23 PM

People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.

What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

by Retric

7/21/2026 at 9:52:36 PM

> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.

by gs17

7/21/2026 at 10:04:00 PM

That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.

by gblargg

7/21/2026 at 9:02:17 PM

I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.

by eikenberry

7/21/2026 at 9:57:52 PM

Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.

There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!

And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?

Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.

Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"

on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.

There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.

Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!

by bryanrasmussen

7/21/2026 at 10:22:11 PM

>Really, all of them?

Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?

Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.

by protocolture

7/21/2026 at 9:57:33 PM

> People do care about income streams for their descendants

Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck

by ekianjo

7/21/2026 at 9:54:52 PM

Yeah silly if ruled otherwise. It would mean copyright defaults to the laggiest country since someone could throw a paper plane with the material over a border.

by hahahaa

7/21/2026 at 8:34:49 PM

Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.

by EmbarrassedHelp

7/21/2026 at 8:41:49 PM

Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)

Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:

"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."

This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.

by shevy-java

7/21/2026 at 10:19:36 PM

> Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed.

That’s the whole point. The courts uphold the law. Change the law, and the courts change what they do.

by hdgvhicv

7/21/2026 at 8:44:01 PM

Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material

by merb

7/21/2026 at 8:32:08 PM

The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.

by ryandrake

7/21/2026 at 8:43:43 PM

That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.

by embedding-shape

7/21/2026 at 9:53:37 PM

There's no irony. A given name does not constitute a mandate to use it any particular way.

by ragall

7/21/2026 at 8:40:03 PM

Is it a design or implementation flaw?

by skinfaxi

7/21/2026 at 8:36:57 PM

EU posts about it:

Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]

https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

Other blog post:

CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability

https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...

by ChrisArchitect

7/21/2026 at 9:23:45 PM

Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.

by phendrenad2

7/21/2026 at 8:38:37 PM

That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future, otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that field for your age: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 - Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)

by shevy-java

7/21/2026 at 8:33:04 PM

Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff

by Havoc

7/21/2026 at 8:48:16 PM

> The UK government has officially scrapped the idea of restricting virtual private networks (VPNs) to enforce its impending social media bans, delivering a massive victory for digital privacy advocates.

> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."

> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-decide...

by bbg2401

7/21/2026 at 10:23:14 PM

British Parliament only has to be lucky once. VPNs have to be lucky every time.

by protocolture

7/21/2026 at 9:12:59 PM

Landmark?

It's Europe.

#3.

Pareto puts them in the insignificant 80%.

Thanks Europe for the cookie message.

by uhhhhwhaaaa

7/21/2026 at 10:20:47 PM

It’s big businesses that want to steal your data and use it against you that put the messages up.

by hdgvhicv

7/21/2026 at 9:28:22 PM

Landmark for Europe, which otherwise seems hell-bent on making just about everything related to AI or the internet illegal in order to extract more cash from American tech companies doing the actual innovation.

by tjwebbnorfolk

7/21/2026 at 9:05:41 PM

[flagged]

by theodric

7/21/2026 at 9:23:51 PM

Please don't post tasteless comments like this on HN.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.

by tomhow

7/21/2026 at 9:30:00 PM

ok but is it correct or incorrect?

by tjwebbnorfolk