[pp.int.general] Swiss Federal Court ruled

Eduardo Robles Elvira edulix at gmail.com
Wed Sep 8 17:20:43 CEST 2010


On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Pascal Gloor
<pascal.gloor at partipirate.ch> wrote:
> Dear Fellow International Pirates,
> Today something unexpected happened, we're not yet sure of all implications
> it has.
> The Swiss Federal Court ruled against Logistep AG (working for the IFPI,
> collecting IP addresses data linked with shared content). IP addresses are
> now part of "personal data" equal to your name, your phone number, your
> social security number (and so on). Personal data is very well protected in
> Switzerland as you may know. Logistep has announced they will move ASAP to
> Germany since their activity is now illegal in Switzerland.
> Having now IP addresses recognised as personal data has a quite large
> impact. "Someone" is not allowed to publish your IP linked to an activity
> (think at anonymous edits of the wikipedia, think at webalizer stats, think
> at mailinglists that publish your IP!).
> As you may know, 'Downloading' is legal in Switzerland while
> 'Uploading/Sharing' is not. But now, since the IPs are protected by law, one
> is not allowed to collect this information anymore, even if collected
> outside Switzerland, it cannot be used in court in Switzerland. This makes
> Switzerland, virtually, a P2P paradise.
> The bad news is, that our parliament will urge itself to make a new law to
> "solve the sharing problem".
> that's for the news, here's a link in english:
> http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/market_news/article.jsp?content=D9I3Q6500
> There's more, just google after "logistep'.
> See you,
> Pascal
>
>
> ---
> Pascal Gloor
> Vice President of the Pirate Party Switzerland
> http://www.partipirate.ch

Hi Pascal and everyone!

Just a bit of information: It's the same in Spain, IP addresses have
been considered private too since 6 years ago. The implications of
this are many as you say: it's difficult to catch people by their IP
addresses. But also for example if you're running a web server that
creates a log containing the ip addresses of your visitors, chances
are you're out of the law too. Not that they enforce that, nor that it
is possible to do it, but then there is the fact.

Best,

Eduardo Robles Elvira
--
Member of PIRATA, Spanish Pirate Party


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