#CJEU

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Five years ago, some anti-fascist counterdemonstrators hit on the clever idea of blaring top 40 music during neo-Nazi marches, on the theory that this would prevent Nazis from uploading videos of their marches to Youtube and other platforms, whose filters would block any footage that included copyrighted music:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

Thankfully, this didn't work, but not for lack of trying. And it might still work, if calls for beefing up video copyright filters are heeded. Cops all over the place are already blaring Taylor Swift songs and Disney tunes to prevent their interactions with the public from being uploaded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

The same thinking that causes progressives to recklessly argue in favor of upload filters also causes them to demand that web scraping be treated as a copyright crime. They think they're creating a world where AI companies can't rip off their creation to train a model; they're actually creating a world where the Internet Archive can't capture JD Vance's embarrassing old podcast appearances or newspaper editorial boards' advocacy for positions they now recant:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's not that Nazi marches are good, or that scraping can't be bad – it's just that advocating for the use of IP to address either is a cure that's not just worse than the disease – it's also not a cure.

A problem can be real, and still not be solvable with IP. I have enormous sympathy for gamers who rail against cheaters who use aftermarket hacks to improve their aim, see through buildings, or command other unfair advantages.

If you want to tell a stranger how they must configure their PC or console, IP ("any law that lets you control your competitors, critics or customers") is an obvious answer. But – as with other attempts to solve real problems with IP – this is a cure that is both worse than the disease, and also not a cure after all.

Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.

But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.

Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.

Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.

Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!

This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:

https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:

https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.

Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web on your behalf and bring back things for you, which it displays in the way you prefer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Want to block flickering GIFs to forestall photosensitive epileptic servers? Ask your user agent to find and delete them. Want to shift colors into a gamut that accounts for your color-blindness? Ask your user-agent:

https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

Want to goose the font size and contrast so you can read the sadistic grey-on-white type that young designers use in the mistaken belief that black-on-white type is "hard on the eyes"? That's what Reader Mode is for:

https://frankgroeneveld.nl/2021/08/24/most-underused-browser-feature/

The foundation of any good digital relationship is a device that works for you, not for the people who own the servers you connect to. Even if they don't plan on screwing you over by directing your user agent to attack you on their behalf right now, the very existence of a facility in your technology that causes it to betray you, by design, is a moral hazard that inevitably results in your victimization:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

"IP" ("a law that lets me control how you use your own property") is a tempting solution to every problem, but ultimately, IP ends up magnifying the power of the already powerful, in contests where your only hope of victory is having a user agent whose only loyalty is to you.

The monotonic, dangerous expansion of IP reflects the growing victory of rents over profits – income from owning things, rather than income from doing things. Everyday people may argue for IP in the belief that it will solve their immediate problems – with AI, or Nazis, or in-game cheats – but ultimately, the expansion of a law that limits how you can use your property (including your capital) to uses that don't threaten neofeudalists will doom you to technoserfdom.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

[commiepinkofag]

CJEU judgment to halt unlawful gender title collection

Historic Win for Trans and Non-binary Rights

The EU Court of Justice has ruled it illegal to collect gender marker data for the purpose of buying train tickets, as the gender is not relevant for providing the service.

The EU Court of Justice has judged that it is unlawful for France’s national railway company to force passengers to choose between ‘Mr’ and ‘Ms’ when purchasing train tickets. The Court ruled that processing civil titles of customers can in some cases create a risk of discrimination on grounds of gender identity. This is the first time that the CJEU evokes the fundamental EU law principle of non-discrimination to protect the ground of gender identity for trans and non-binary people. The importance of this judgement therefore extends beyond the applicant’s individual circumstances. All public and private organisations that are required to comply with GDPR in the EU will need to comply with this judgment and stop collecting gender markers when it is not strictly necessary in the light of the purposes for which this data is processed. The judgment also underscores the broader issue faced by trans and non-binary people who are constantly forced to choose in their everyday lives between two options that do not correspond to their identity. Also, binary trans people, whose identity documents do not match their gender identity, will benefit from fewer mandatory forms asking for a gender marker, when it is not necessary to the service or contract at hand. 

trainsgender!

[dimitrisxenos]

CJEU: Meta must "minimise" use of personal data for ads

The Court decided on two issues:

1) Massively limiting the use of personal data for online advertisements.

2) Limiting the use of publicly available personal data to the originally intended purposes for publication.

Judgment: C-446/21 (Schrems v. Meta)

[dduane]

TL;DR: A trans refugee's challenge of Hungary's refusal to recognise his gender identity on legal documents has set a precedent for the whole European Union that could lead to changes all over the continent.

[queertranshappiness]

Today's good queer and trans news, from across this week (14th July):

3 major Irish mental health professional bodies have signed a joint memorandum against conversion therapy

Same sex marriage has been legalised in Aruba, St Martins and Curaçao

The Japanese Supreme Court has ruled a trans woman can change her legal gender without getting gender affirming surgery, which is a victory for trans bodily autonomy, even if the fight continues to fully de-medicalise the process

2 queerphobic board members of a Californian school district have lost a recall election, after attempting last year to ban all non-state flags from being flown in schools, targeting Pride and other movement flags

27 more small cities and towns across the US have hosted their first Prides this year

The Advocate General of the EU's Court of Justice has released an opinion that SNCF, the French national rail company, must offer other title options than Mr and Mrs in their ticket system, which is a good step for nonbinary people and GDPR, as a case about it works through the court

And the School Diversity Week program, run by queer youth charity Just Like Us, has reached over 7400 schools and 4.7 million pupils this year across the UK, making this year's program the biggest ever so far

(Credit to: GCN (https://gcn.ie/irish-mental-health-organisations-memorandum-conversion-therapy/), @/queernewsdaily on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/C9VqnFsy_IZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) and LGBTQ Nation (https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/07/historic-japan-court-ruling-allows-trans-woman-to-change-gender-without-surgery/, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/07/school-district-votes-out-board-members-who-banned-pride-flags-in-schools/, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/07/dozens-of-small-towns-hosted-their-first-pride-events-this-year/), TGEU (https://www.tgeu.org/cjeu-advocate-general-rules-collection-of-civil-titles-is-unlawful-and-risks-discrimination-against-trans-and-non-binary-peop/), and @/justlikeusuk on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/C9NQkcGC2XB/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) for these.)

[turquoisewaves07]

"What does the CJEU decision [that data should refer to a person's lived gender identity, not that assigned at birth] mean for the UK?

The UK's position on gender recognition is now nominally at odds with the EU's Data Protection regime. But the UK mustn't let their data protection regime come unmoored from the EU's, or they will lose their status of 'adequacy', threatening the free exchange of personal data that their economy relies upon.

So it seems likely that this is the high water mark for the Imperial gender binary. The UK Supreme Court decision applies to one word in one act. But, without coming undone from the principles of data protection, the UK state can't lawfully take actions to process people's gender data in a way that ignores their lived experience in favour of their gender status at birth. If the government tries to operationalise the judgment more generally, the UK GDPR sits waiting for it like the troll under the bridge."

- Simon McGarr, The Gist: Trans rights are Data rights

[thatfrenchacademic]

Crawling back from my grave, sleep deprived from a conference, where I have learned live, in the middle of a panel about human rights, about the Latest Bad Take of the UK Supreme Court.

No energy to make a full post about it, and also I have not gone through the decision yet, BUT

If you are looking for some recent positive stuff about trans* rights in Europe

The Court of the Justice of the EU has, for its part, been on an absolute spree of encouraging decisions! Check out the Mirin case, the Mousse case and the Deldits case (C-247/23) !

And some explanations for each of these case, in case you are not savvy in EU Law, by trans rights origanisations : for Mirin, for Mousse, and for Deldits . Like, I know, it's the CJEU, it's not as high profile and it's a bit technical, but progress is progress.

Public Duty accomplished, I will chug some more coffee and get back to work from my hotel lobby.

[worsethankonstantinlevin]

After a trans refugee in Hungary won his casr seeking to change his legal name and gender at the Supreme Court, all EU states will be required to correct any publicly held name and gender data for trans people who have transitioned, and are explicitly banned from requiring evidence of gender-affirming surgery to do so.

[nsfwmiamiart]

Europol Agency: "You are a prisoner of war, and your date of birth is November 11, 1981, correct?" Angelo (POW): "Yes, that's correct. How can I assist you?" Europol Agency: "We will call you to testify in court at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). We also vow to protect your human rights. You have our word! Don't worry, we will ensure that these corrupt politicians and intelligence officers cannot harm you." Angelo (POW): "Finally, some help after seven long years—2017 to 2024. This marks the end of my imprisonment as a POW." Europol Agency: "We will also defend the human rights of all your family members. You no longer need to worry about persecution." Angelo (POW): "Thank you. I am truly grateful." Europol Agency: "You're welcome. You've shown great bravery in fighting against these tyrants."

[acnewsworld]

The European Commission has initiated legal proceedings against the United Kingdom, alleging breaches of the post-Brexit agreement on the free movement of people.

In a statement issued on Monday, the Commission announced it had referred the UK to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for “failing to comply with EU law on the free movement of EU citizens and their family members at the end of 2020.”

Brussels diplomats cited “severe shortcomings” in the UK’s implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement, which they claim continue to negatively affect EU citizens.....

Read More

[mariacallous]

For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead.

Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as fines, legal cases, and regulatory attention pressured the company to change the way it asks users to consent to targeted advertising. On Monday, however, the European Commision rejected its latest solution, arguing its “pay or consent” subscription is illegal under the bloc’s new digital markets act (DMA).

“Our preliminary view is that Meta’s ‘Pay or Consent’ business model is in breach of the DMA,” Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the EU’s Internal Market, said in a statement. “The DMA is there to give back to the users the power to decide how their data is used and ensure innovative companies can compete on equal footing with tech giants on data access.”

Meta denied its subscription model broke the rules. “Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta spokesperson Matt Pollard told WIRED, referring to a Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision in July that said that Meta needed to offer users an alternative to ads, if necessary for an appropriate fee. “We look forward to further constructive dialogue with the European Commission to bring this investigation to a close.”

In a press briefing on Monday morning, Commission officials said their concern was not that the company was charging for an ad-free service. “This is perfectly fine for us, as long as we have the middle option,” they said, explaining there should be a third option that may still contain ads but are just less targeted. There are different, less-specific ways of providing advertising to users, they added, such as contextual advertising. “The consumer needs to be in a position to choose an alternative version of the service which relies on non personalization of the ads.”

Under the DMA, very large tech platforms must ask users for consent if they want to share their personal data with other parts of their businesses. In Meta’s case, the Commission said it is particularly concerned about the competitive advantage Meta receives over its rivals by being able to combine the data from platforms like Instagram and its advertising business.

Meta has a chance to respond to the charges issued on Monday. However if the company cannot reach an agreement with regulators before March 2025, Brussels has the power to levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s global turnover.

In the past week, the EU has issued a series of reprimands to US tech giants. The Commission warned Apple that its App Store is in breach of EU rules for preventing app developers offering promotions directly to their users. Brussels also accused Microsoft of abusing its dominance in the office-software market, following a complaint from rival Slack.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that member states must recognize legal documents from other countries that reflect a person’s changed name and gender identity, regardless of the member state’s own laws on changing one’s name and identity. This decision comes in light of a Romanian transgender man, Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi, who moved to the United Kingdom when the island country was still a member of the European Union (EU). Mirzarafie-Ahi had legally changed his gender identity and name while in the United Kingdom. He attempted to use his newly changed U.K. documents to receive an altered birth certificate from Romania. However, the country did not recognize his altered name and identity, leading him to sue Romania in the CJEU.

Romania argued that the name and gender change violated their laws, and that, since the United Kingdom was no longer a member of the EU, any changes within that country do not need to be recognized by Romania under its obligations to other EU member nations. The court, however, argued that Romania’s reasoning would unlawfully restrict EU citizens’ freedom of movement and residence between different countries.

Additionally, the court argued that Romania’s policy would put an undue burden on individuals like Mirzarafie-Ahi, who would then have to be known as two different names and genders in different countries, creating legislative hurdles as they attempt to prove their identity. The court said such policies would restrict the “right to establish details of their identity as individual human beings, which includes the right of transsexual people to personal development and physical and moral integrity and to respect for and recognition of their sexual identity.”

[...]

Mirzarafie-Ahi told The Washington Post that this “really is quite amazing,” especially in light of his past experiences with Romania. When traveling to the country, he would often run into issues with border control, who would press him on the differences between his passport information and his actual appearance. They would ask invasive questions relating to what surgeries he had received and what his genitals were like. Romania refused to update his passport.

Now, however, he can openly state that he is from Romania. This decision reflects a similar case from 2018, where the CJEU ruled that member states have to recognize same-sex marriages from other countries, even if they themselves do not allow such unions. The court’s ruling faced immense pushback from more conservative EU countries like Bulgaria which argued that the ruling would restrict their individual rights. The same may be argued by EU member states now, says Catherine Barnard, an expert in EU law at the University of Cambridge. “Of course, to liberals, it’s a good thing, to use the courts to push Romania to become more progressive, but if you’re more conservative or hostile to the EU, you can say, ‘How dare the EU interfere with things that go to the heart of our beliefs,’” Barnard told The Washington Post.

The Court of Justice of the European Union rules that countries in the European Union must recognize trans people’s changed names and gender identity from other nations even if their country has laws prohibiting such changes.

The case in question is about a Romania trans man named Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi.

[thoughtlessarse]

An advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued an opinion finding that Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK) has launched an “unprecedented revolt” and “frontal attack on the fundamental principles of the EU legal order”. In response, the TK rejected the EU official’s finding, saying that he had himself made a “blatant encroachment on the exclusive competences of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal”. The case in question was brought against Poland by the European Commission in 2023 and concerns two rulings issued by the TK in 2021 that disputed the compatibility of EU law and CJEU judgments with Poland’s constitution. At that time, Poland was ruled by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which regularly clashed with Brussels. The TK was (and remains) stacked with PiS-appointed judges and is widely regarded as being under the political influence of the party, which is now in opposition. In July 2021, the TK found that an interim order against Poland issued by the CJEU was “inconsistent with the [Polish] constitution”. In October of the same year, the TK ruled – following a request from the PiS prime minister – that parts of European law are inconsistent with the Polish constitution, which takes precedence over them.

continue reading

[cyclopscave]

Some good news: a trans refugee challenged Hungary, the country he was seeking refuge, in the Court of Justice of the European Union, for allowing him citizenship only under his AGAB, and not his actual gender. He claimed this was against GDPR, and won his case.

[kennak]

国連サイバー犯罪条約で言及されている人権のセーフガードは、全くもって不十分である。これらのセーフガードは、人権も公平な裁判を受ける権利も無罪推定の原則も尊重しないアラブ諸国の法律の現実を反映していない。 チュニジア、モーリタニア、リビア、パレスチナのサイバー犯罪法は、十分なセーフガードなしに監視や通信の傍受を許可している。これらの規定の詳細な分析からも、プライバシーの権利を保護するための適切なセーフガードが完全に欠如していることをわかっている。例えば、これらのいずれの国においても、当局は監視対象となった個人に捜査の終了を通知する義務がなく、法律違反があった場合の救済を受ける権利が奪われている。 一方、アルジェリア、レバノン、パレスチナ、チュニジア、エジプトでは、サイバー犯罪法により、電気通信サービスプロバイダは司法の許可なしに、予防的かつ体系的に大量のユーザデータを収集することが求められている。企業はその後、特定の個人を対象とする将来の刑事捜査に必要となる可能性があるという口実で、このデータを数年間保管することを義務付けられている。 このような大規模なデータの収集と処理により、人々の日常的な習慣や移動、通常の居住地、社会的つながりなどについて推論を導き出すことができるようになる。このような行為は、過剰かつ不均衡であり、プライバシーとデータ保護に対する権利を侵害する。欧州連合司法裁判所（CJEU）は、特定の犯罪の容疑なしに、すべてのユーザのトラフィックデータの予防的かつ自動的な保存を電気通信サービスプロバイダに強制することは、個人データとプライバシーの保護への権利を侵害すると判断している。

「サイバー犯罪」法がデジタルライツを脅か��：アラブ地域から学ぶべき教訓 » p2ptk[.]org

[ericvanderburg]

Analysis: CJEU ruling clarifies where liability for processors, controllers begins and ends

http://securitytc.com/T0yfNP