IPrivacy4IT - Clarinette's blog. IP Addresses and User Privacy In Europe, experience with totalitarian governments has justified the search for stronger laws and policies for the protection of personal information.
On the other hand, Google grew up in the US which has a rather liberal approach, emphasizing the First Amendment, and Freedom of Speech and information. There is no data protection commission or commissioners in the US equivalent to those in Europe. These two divergent approaches create uncertainty regarding what can be expected from a company like Google operating from the US but reaching EU users. IPrivacy4IT - Clarinette's blog. Update 04/05/2011: A U.S.
District Court has ruled that an IP address is not the same thing as a person’s identification. It was a case of music copyright infringing download.The US court recognised the IP address of an infringing account does not result on the culpability of the account holder, Thank god for this clarification reversion the presumption of fraud.
Surely a common sense approach bringing some Fresh air to the war of digital copyright. That doesn’t mean the IP address is not a private information. More cases on pearltrees. ECJ Confirms That IP Addresses Are Personal Data - Intellectual Property - European Union. Check to state you have read and agree to our Terms and Conditions Terms & Conditions and Privacy Statement Mondaq.com (the Website) is owned and managed by Mondaq Ltd and as a user you are granted a non-exclusive, revocable license to access the Website under its terms and conditions of use.
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Are IP addresses personal data? IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says - washingtonpost.com. BRUSSELS -- IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the E.U. group, which is preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others comply with E.U. privacy law. IP addresses and the Data Protection Act. An IP address in isolation is not personal data under the Data Protection Act, according to the Information Commissioner.
But an IP address can become personal data when combined with other information or when used to build a profile of an individual, even if that individual's name is unknown. What is an IP address? Computers and other devices that are connected to the internet are assigned unique identifiers known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to identify and communicate with each other. The internet's authority for names and numbers is ICANN, based in California.
Judge Rules IP Addresses Are Insufficient Evidence To Identify Pirates. Mass lawsuits have been one of the most effective weapons rightsholders have had against torrenters.
By using IP addresses to identify infringers, rightsholders have not only been able to find a large supply of alleged infringers to take action against, but are also to attach names — and wallets — to instances of infringement. Privacy This Week. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) clarified that IP addresses are 'protected personal data', on 24 November 2011, in Scarlet v SABAM (Case C-70/10), while ruling that internet service providers (ISPs) cannot be legally compelled to monitor the online activities of their customers.
The case was referred to the CJEU after an injunction granted by the Brussels Court of First Instance ordered internet service provider Scarlet to use web filtering to prevent customers from sending or receiving copyrighted files by means of peer-to-peer software. The files were songs and videos owned by SABAM members, a consortium of artists, authors, composers, and publishers. In 2004, SABAM filed the original complaint against Scarlet. 'Those addresses are protected personal data because they allow those users to be precisely identified', read the CJEU judgment. . © 2014 Cecile Park Publishing Ltd. Hawktalk. The ICO’s enforcement (or lack of enforcement depending on your view) in the Royal Free/DeepMind case has divided the data protection community.
The ICO found that the Royal Free had breached four data protection principles, had breached the medical confidentiality of 1.6 million patients but concluded that such a breach warranted an Undertaking. Reaction from many data protection specialists has often been on the following lines: “If a breach on this scale involving millions of patients’ Health Sensitive Personal Data does not warrant a Monetary Penalty Notice, what does?”. Turning numbers into names: how IP address lookups are done. We wouldn't have file-sharing lawsuits at all without the ability to convert a computer's IP address into an Internet subscriber's real name.
But how do Internet providers actually perform those lookups? The process begins when a copyright holder files suit and supplies the court with a list of IP addresses that were allegedly seen sharing files online. The court then allows the rightsholder to send a subpoena to the Internet service provider (ISPs) responsible for each address, where it goes to a special compliance unit. These units are not large. Time Warner Cable told a DC federal court last year that its own subpoena compliance unit had only four full-time employees (but it had been forced to add a temp worker due to the growing number of requests).
Most of these lookups are done for law enforcement, and many of them are emergency requests. According to Time Warner, the burden is almost unmanageable. "Multiple people in multiple locations" IP addresses and user identification in the WikiLeaks case. Amid the news that the U.S. government has subpoenaed from Twitter data about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others thought to be tied to the group is the issue of IP addresses. An Internet Protocol address is a unique 32-bit numeric address that can identify a specific computer on a network. IP addresses, generally assigned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), can be temporary (called dynamic IP addresses) or permanently (called static IP addresses). Reuters reports: “The information sought by the government includes all connection records and session times, IP addresses used to access Twitter, e-mail and residential addresses plus billing records and details of bank accounts and credit cards.”
There has been substantial debate over whether IP addresses are personally identifiable data. I believe they are, as they can easily link specific computers to individuals. Concerning the WikiLeaks subpoena. the Associated Press reports: Jurisprudence actualité Droit Internet. Lundi 1er février 2010 Cour d’appel de Paris 12ème chambre, pôle 5 Arrêt du 1er février 2010 Cyrille S. / Sacem, Sdrm droit d’auteur - contrefaçon - constat - autorisation - agent assermenté - fichier - données personnelles - cnil - peer to peer - adresse ip - infraction - traitement La saisine du tribunal et la prévention : M. Cyrille S. a été poursuivi par citation du procureur de la République pour avoir : A Fougères, courant 2004 et jusqu’au 04 janvier 2005, reproduit, par quelque moyen que ce soit, une oeuvre de l’esprit, en violation des droits de son auteur définis par la loi, en l’espèce par le téléchargement et la mise à disposition sur internet de 26 649 fichiers audio, faits prévus par art.
Le jugement du 07 mai 2007 Sur l’action publique A déclaré S. Sur l’action civile A reçu la Sacem et la Sdrm en leur constitution de partie civile et a condamné S. Et a ordonné l’exécution provisoire de la décision sur les intérêts civils. Appel a été interjeté par M. Au fond : En la forme . Au fond. IP addresses in server logs not personal data: Ruling. High performance access to file storage. Swiss Supreme Court: data protection prevails over enforcement of IP rights. In a decision of 8 September 2010 (full grounds not yet published, press release here), the Swiss Supreme Court ruled that Logistep AG may not search peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringing files, register the IP [internet protocol] addresses of the uploaders and forward them to the copyright owners, which then, based on the data, file criminal complaints against unknown (the prosecution, unlike private parties, can force the ISPs to hand over name and address of the person/entity behind the IP address).
Logistep, acting for copyright holders (not the International Federation Of Producers Of Phonograms And Videograms, IFPI, though, says IFPI) searches peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringing files, then registers the IP addresses of the uploaders (pure downloading is legal under Swiss law) and forwards these to the copyright owners.