Finnish Court Rules Open WiFi Network Owner not Liable
Finnish Court Rules Open WiFi Network Owner not Liable for Infringement
Several hundred use a network, someone infringes—can’t blame the owner.
by Cyrus Farivar ars tecnica - May 14 2012
A Finnish District Court has ruled that the owner of an open WiFi network is not liable for copyright infringement by others using that network.
“The applicants were unable to provide any evidence that the connection-owner herself had been involved in the file-sharing,” the defendant’s attorneys wrote in an English-language press release on Monday. “The court thus examined whether the mere act of providing a WiFi connection not protected with a password can be deemed to constitute a copyright-infringing act.”
The case was brought by the Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre, a coalition of intellectual property rights managers in Finland. The group sued the woman for €6,000 ($7,700) for copyright infringement. The alleged infringement occurred after an audience of several hundred were attending a play at defendant's home on July 14, 2010, and apparently at least one person downloaded some copyrighted material without permission.
Finland, of course, de-criminalized using open WiFi in 2010, after having previously restricting it back in 2005.
The new ruling in Finland appears to fall in line with a lack of liability for open WiFi network operators in the United States, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The group says open WiFi is “a mere conduit for the communications of others, and often enjoys statutory immunities. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there is a safe harbor for service providers who offer ‘the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user’s choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.’ That definition fits a provider of free public WiFi as easily as a traditional DSL provider.”
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