Sweden: IP numbers are personal...unless you're a pirate A ruling from a Swedish court that IP numbers should be considered personal data will not have any impact on the country's recently passed anti-piracy law. The Swedish Supreme Administrative Court ruled today that IP numbers should be considered personal information. This is a hot topic because copyright holders routinely use …
Everybody write any rubbish song you can think of; Sing A capella into your webcam microphone, if you have to, or film your dog cleaning itself. Post it on your own website, and hey presto! You're a rights holder, and can demand information from the ISPs until they fall down under the influx of requests.
it seems the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court are using the EU directives correctly
as regards IP are personal data.
it also seems that that Swedish Personal Data Act clause Antipiratbyrån, and their like will be relying on from now on,
only applys "IF, and ONLY IF, these self proclaimed anti infringment orgs using IP and related defined data, actually bring a court case and see it through to completion all the way to the end without dropping the case", or else theres a case for the EU directives to be used by any EU person effected by their use of personal data as defined and outlined for instance here
http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2009/wp159_en.pdf
"…
4. IP ADDRESSES
The Parliament and the Commission propose to introduce a new Recital (27a) on IP
addresses16.
The Working Party welcomes the wording proposed in the Commission’s Comments when it makes specific reference to its work. However, the Working Party does not support the proposal to make an explicit reference to this issue in a directive.
In this respect, it re-emphasises its earlier Opinion17 that unless the service provider “is in a position to distinguish with absolute certainty that the data correspond to users that cannot be identified, it will have to treat all IP information as personal data, to be on the safe side”.
IP addresses relate to identifiable persons in most cases. Identifiability means identifiable by the access provider or by other means, with the help of additional identifiers such as cookies or in interactions with internet services with which the data subject is identified explicitly or implicitly.
Recital 26 of the Data Protection Directive clearly specifies that to determine if a person is
identifiable, “account should be taken of all the means likely reasonably to be used either by the controller or by any other person to identify the said person”.
The definition of personal data in the Data Protection Directive refers to data ‘relating’ to a
person, and IP addresses are commonly used to distinguish between users to whom should be applied a different treatment for example in the context of targeted advertisement serving or profile creation…..
”
Whats to stop anyone private or law enforcement simple "accusing" someone using an ip address of copyright infringement and getting there info that way. Nothing in the ipred law thing says that the accusations must be proven now does it?
And if anyone thinks that a government organisation or private company will not use that loop hole let me tell you here in the uk local councils are using anti terrorism laws to investigate peoples bins for recycled material and people letting there dog foul the pavement.
Like the current people in charge here are finding out when you piss of the people you get your backside handed to you at election time.
Maybe more people should campaign for laws that allow the people to kick out and reelect there government if a loss of faith arrives at anytime not just ever so many years.
Good luck with that, I dont think there will be many proxies across the world that will stay up for the lenght of time needed to get a torrent if they allow such activity.
Back on topic, if you think about it logically, wouldnt the IP be the property of the ISP? They are just assigning part of their network to you after all.
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