[OpenWireless Tech] Germany Court ruling affects open wifi

[Andy Green]

Hi -

This doesn't change anything compared to what we have been saying, to make any headway with turning the situation with consumer AP sharing around a story is needed that changes the deal to get away from the problem of the AP owner potentially dragged into a user's mess.

Vpn-only does not have the ap owner serving anything at all from his side, it just provides the first hop to a vpn that is nothing to do with the ap owner, and which must go out again under a different IP the vpn client is responsible for to get anything done.

Since it's the EFF it would be very cool to get a declaratory judgement helping someone get to a vpn so they can access the Internet under their own credentials is different than going out to the Internet for them, I don't know how difficult or possible that is, but it would certainly kickstart interest in doing vpn-only if it was told it was safe by the courts.

-Andy

Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org> wrote:

>Unfortunately, this is not surprising -- in Europe, it is not uncommon
>for ISPs to be held liable for any content found on their servers,
>regardless of how it got on there. So, don't run web proxy servers, if
>you don't want to be considered a criminal because one of your
>customers surfed to a web page that would be considered hateful but
>legal in other jurisdictions.
>
>We ran into this problem all the time when I was working at Belgacom
>Skynet, the largest ISP in Belgium. We had our own team of censors that
>would constantly monitor all popular content on the servers (based on
>weblog activity) and would pro-actively remove content and shut
>accounts down, if we found anything that might get us in trouble with
>the police.
>
>-- 
>Brad Knowles
>Sent from my iPad
>
>On Nov 24, 2012, at 6:03 PM, Christian Huldt <christian at solvare.se>
>wrote:
>
>> But wouldn't that open for an analogy with snailmail and open the
>mail service for liability for any "terrorist threats" etc?
>> I firmly believe that this should be overthrown at a higher level,
>but don't trust the EU enough to want to gamble...
>> 
>> 
>> Natanael skrev 2012-11-24 19:36:
>>> The way the article describes it, Tor outproxies would be liable
>too.
>>> I2P and all other networks like it too, even Gnunet.
>>> 
>>> He is essentially saying that the messenger is liable for the
>contents
>>> of the message even if he can't know what it is. Which means that to
>>> avoid liability you can't pass on messages you don't know is legal.
>>> 
>>> Steganography, anyone?
>>> 
>>> Den 24 nov 2012 19:17 skrev "Sam Gleske" <sam.mxracer at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:sam.mxracer at gmail.com>>:
>>> 
>>>   
>https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-file-sharing-ruled-illegal-by-german-court-121123/
>>> 
>>>    For those concerned about legal ramifications of running an open
>>>    Wi-Fi access point a German court has ruled that the owners of
>the
>>>    network are responsible for their users.
>>> 
>>>    This affects the open wireless movement.
>>> 
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