EU Tells Music Business To Get Its Damn Dirty Paws Off Its Citizens

Following a similar incident in Spain, a German court has declined to force Internet service providers to fork over information about their users so the music industry could look into possible copyright violations, claiming that industry groups had yet to provide sufficient evidence of criminal activity to violate the users’ right to privacy. This comes after the European Court of Justice declared that, if a country only allows ISP’s to breach users’ privacy when a criminal case is brought before its courts, that country can rest on the fact that it’s sticking to EU guidelines, regardless of how loudly the biz bleats:

Advocate-General Juliane Kokott produced advice for the ECJ on a Spanish case in which a copyright holders’ group wanted ISP Telefonica to hand over subscriber details to it.

Kokott said that details did not have to be handed over in civil cases such as Telefonica’s, and that they only had to be handed over in criminal cases. The ECJ does not have to follow an Advocate-General’s advice, but does so in over three-quarters of cases.

Another German authority had made a similar decision earlier this year, according to Heise Online. The chief prosecutor’s office in Celle refused to offer a handover because it said that substantial damage had not been shown, and that it doubted that music industry representatives would use the evidence to bring a criminal case.

If European authorities begin to refuse to order the hand over of subscriber details in civil cases it will severely hamper the music industry’s attempts to take civil action against file sharers.

In most European countries, including the UK, copyright infringement is only a criminal offence when conducted on a commercial scale. Most individual file-sharing would be unlikely to count as a criminal offence.

This probably won’t have much impact in America, where we just love a good civil case, but folks in the EU can take comfort in the fact that they can continue downloading songs from schlager combos and Estonian Eurovision hopefuls in total anonymity.

Music Industry Rebuffed Across Europe On File-Sharing Identifications [The Register, via Hypebot]