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.
Result for: criminal offense
The Frankenthal district court in Germany has thrown out a lawsuit against a suspected unauthorized file sharer after claiming that the evidence used to prosecute him was “obtained in an unconstitutional way”.
The evidence was originally obtained by Swiss-based anti-piracy agency Logistep, which provided the users IP address to the content owners. The rights holders then used the IP address to begin the criminal complaint. Prosecutors then asked for the user’s name from his German ISP and used it to begin the civil lawsuit. That same process has been used to start almost 30,000 similar lawsuits in Germany over the years.
The court has now ruled however that the ISP is not allowed to give out the defendant’s names because file sharing “doesn’t count as a serious criminal offense.” That his name and address were handed over violates citizen’s constitutional right to privacy, the ruling read.
As there is no common law in Germany the case wont affect the thousands of other alleged file sharers in the same position but the decision should give defendants more leverage if they choose to take the case to court.
