This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.
It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
But, still:
> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.
Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]
> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.
After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.
It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...
The FBI will occasionally seize a domain, but only after a court order.
Of course they do, mostly for intellectual property reasons.
We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control.
We're arguing about whether governments executing censorship regimes via ISPs (like the Chinese Communist Party) without any balanced legal proceedings is a good thing.
And no, it does not happen like that in the US.
If your scenario makes it impossible for someone to do ordinary business in country A but not in country B then it's fundamentally unworkable.
They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.
They just want their share.
I responded to the wrong comment, I ment to respond to the GP.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar.
Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids.
Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.
There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!
And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?
Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.
Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"
on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.
There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.
Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
“And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.
“What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
from doing so than by any thought of praise.”
Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.
Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?
Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...
For the most part, I agree.
You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc.
Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists.
Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.
EU lawmakers follow tech trends by a lag of at least a decade and lay waste as they move along. Imagine what they will require once they understand how tech people no longer use chatbots and how much we can control AI agents.
Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:
"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."
This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.
That’s the whole point. The courts uphold the law. Change the law, and the courts change what they do.
Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]
https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
Other blog post:
CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
I find these are often very readable and interesting.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-decide...
It's Europe.
#3.
Pareto puts them in the insignificant 80%.
Thanks Europe for the cookie message.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.
I really need to spend some time thinking about this one. If something is correct, I don't tend to continue analyzing it further to look for reasons to be angry.