p2pnet news | P2P:- Germans accused of file sharing will no longer be equated with hard-core criminals.

They’re not the same, a court has in effect ruled.Entertainment and media companies won’t be allowed to force German ISPs to hand over the identities of subscribers accused of copyright infringement, says the decision. Only people accused of crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed, says TorrentFreak, going on:

“Germany has some of the toughest copyright laws and it’s thought that as many as 200,000 German file-sharers have had their identities revealed … so that they may be threatened with legal action.

“According to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer defending file-sharers in Germany, the system typically operated like this: ‘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.’ This would then force an ISP to hand over the identity of an alleged file-sharer and they would be threatened to pay up - or else.”

But Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) has now rejected measures which allow investigators to search computers online without permission, says the story, adding a German law student told TorrentFreak >>>

At the moment, I can’t imagine any realistic way file-sharers can be caught. It’s possible lobby groups will try to make file-sharing count as a ‘heavy crime’, but I doubt they will have much luck.

The German criminal justice judicial system is quite overextended, and the people are overworked. Public prosecutors and judges alike were quite pissed off that they had to invest time in the many file-sharing cases, which were obviously irrelevant in a criminal law sense.

The public interest to put file sharers in prison is simply not there.

The ruling is temporary for six months, after which it’ll probably be made final, says the post, adding:

” The common consensus among legal commentators is that the Federal Constitutional Court is extremely unlikely to change their decision.”

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Also See:
TorrentFreak - German Court Decision Hands Big Win to File-Sharers, March 20, 2008

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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