Showing posts with label cafes with free WiFi hotspots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cafes with free WiFi hotspots. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The unique legal concept that led to Germany’s weird wifi laws; Quartz, July 30, 2018

Edmund Heaphy, Quartz;  The unique legal concept that led to Germany’s weird wifi laws

"Germany is about to get a lot more free wifi. One of the country’s highest courts has upheld a 2017 law designed to put an end to the effect of a peculiar legal concept known as Störerhaftung as it applies to public wifi networks.

For more than a decade, Störerhaftung—most commonly translated as “interferer’s liability”—meant that providers of public wifi could be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users of their networks. That had an obvious chilling effect: By some measures, Germany, the EU’s largest economy, has around half the number of cafes with free wifi hotspots per capita than countries like the UK, Austria, and Sweden.

The court ruling means that, at long last, German businesses can be confident that the law will protect them from prosecution for such copyright infringement."