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Deutsch: Französisches Gericht: IP-Adressen reichen für die Identifikation ei...
The Paris Appeal Court has recently ruled that an IP address does not allow the identification of an Internet user and therefore needs no prior authorization from CNIL (National Commission for Information Technologies and Civil Liberties) to be collected.
The decision comes to support the ruling of the Cassation Court of 13 January 2009 stating that the collection of an IP address by the collective society SACEM agents was not to be considered as automatic treatment of personal data, thus reversing a previous decision of the Rennes Appeal Court of May 2009 which had considered the IP address as nominal data for the collection of which the prior authorization of the CNIL was needed.
According to the French Data Protection Act, sworn agents may process data related to offences, convictions, and safety measures on behalf of rights holders of victims of copyright infringements in order to ensure the defense of these rights but such processing, automatic or not, has to be previously authorized by the CNIL.
However, the Court of Cassation considered that such a sworn agent does not need a prior CNIL authorization if he accesses manually a person's list of files uploaded onto a peer-to-peer network in violation of copyrights. In the court's opinion, the collection of an IP address in order to find the user's identity through his ISP does not constitute data processing.
While the Court of Cassation did not express a view as to whether an IP address qualifies as personal data, the Appeal Court considers the IP address as the material evidence of the infringement and cannot be considered personal data because it does not identify the user.
The court also rejected the private copy exception by considering it "is not applicable to downloading, the purpose of using p2p software being exactly that of sharing and exchanging files between users (...)."
Justice: the IP address is not enough to identify a pirate (only in French,
18.02.2010)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15105-justice-l-adresse-ip-n-est-pas-...
French Court of Cassation Rules on Data Protection and Online Copyright
Infringement (11.02.2010)
http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2009/02/articles/french-court-of-cass...