--- title: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in... description: The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that VPN providers are not liable for copyright infringement when users bypass geo-blocking restrictions.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling | daily.dev og:description: The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that VPN providers are not liable for copyright infringement when users bypass geo-blocking restrictions.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ksBJzXPTA.png og:image:alt: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that VPN providers are not liable for copyright infringement when users bypass geo-blocking restrictions. The ruling establishes that geo-blocking is the copyright holder's responsibility, not the VPN provider's. This is seen as a significant precedent, particularly relevant to ongoing UK government discussions about potentially restricting VPN usage under the guise of child protection measures. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 165 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-30). **TL;DR:** The HN thread is largely a meta-discussion about a misread opening comment (mistaken for pro-VPN-ban ragebait) and a duplicate post notice, with substantive debate about VPN utility, trustworthiness of commercial VPN providers, and whether the EU court ruling is genuinely protective or just a temporary reprieve. **Sentiment:** 35% positive · 40% mixed · 25% skeptical **The case for** - VPNs have clear legitimate uses: corporate remote access, bypassing censorship, ISP tracking/injection prevention, and reducing attack surface for self-hosted services. - The ruling is seen as a positive signal for civil liberties amid a wave of online-safety-driven restrictions. - VPNs provide useful layered security even if TLS covers most encryption needs. **The pushback** - Commercial VPN providers are widely suspected of being honeypots or logging traffic despite no-log claims. - Most mainstream VPN IPs are trivially detectable and blocked by anti-bot systems, limiting practical utility. - The ruling is narrow (copyright liability only) and commenters fear it will prompt legislators to craft new laws explicitly making VPNs liable. - Rolling your own VPN sacrifices anonymity since the IP is unique to one user. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Discussion is dominated by meta-commentary about a misread sarcastic comment and a duplicate-post notice, with substantive threads split between defending VPN legitimacy and skepticism about commercial providers and the ruling's long-term significance. **Hottest debate:** Whether the EU court ruling genuinely protects VPNs or will simply prompt new legislation that imposes liability or KYC requirements on VPN providers. **Open questions** - Will EU or UK legislators respond to this ruling by drafting new laws that explicitly mandate VPN provider logging or age verification? - Can any commercial VPN provider actually be trusted given the difficulty of verifying no-log claims? - Does the ruling apply broadly or only to the specific copyright liability question at issue? **Highlights** > I think an issue VPNs face is that while your first paragraph is not objectively true, it ends up being truer than I might like because the other use cases are not well covered. If you've got one of the things the HN gestalt would call a non-sketchy use case, you've also got the problem that it's rather hard to verify that any VPN you are using actually fulfills your goals. They can say they do, but you have a very hard time proving it. On my current fiber provider, I'm already behind a very large CGNAT install. To a large degree, de facto that's already a lot of the "non-sketchy" use cases for VPN covered for me. IP addresses are already one of the weaker signals for tracking people as it is. Mobile networks have been letting you shift IPs for years just by how they work. Other internet providers that don't slap thousands of people at a crack behind one IPv4 with CGNAT didn't necessarily guarantee stable IP addresses, hence the need for dynamic DNS for decades. The hole VPNs plug is necessary, but not even remotely sufficient if you are trying to actually protect yourself from some attack. Slapping a default Windows 11 install on a VPN to a first approximation protects you from nothing. And since the "non-sketchy" uses are rather dubious, that really does sort of leave just the sketchy ones. I don't think it's a coincidence that when they pay a YouTuber to advertise them, the YouTuber generally ends up talking vaguely about the protections but fairly concretely about the sketchy uses, with screen shots showing them using Netflix in a different country. The companies know what they're getting used for and what they can provide. > — [jerf on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110574) > If I were a governmental body I would do everything I could to keep citizens using paid VPN's and big CDN's. Money trails are easy to follow and the majority of people are just paying with their bank. It makes people feel safe and more likely to expose certain behaviors. Paid VPN's can say they do not have logs whilst having real time lawful intercept API's. Ban VPN's and people will fall back to the myriad of open source alternatives that can be a bit harder to peel back and get logs assuming any exist in the first place. This was a thing some time ago. Many of the malware and pirate groups were sharing Tinc meshes though as expected there would at times be one person in the group that would be the weakest link and expose the entire group. Expand the numbers of people doing this and the probability of a few groups using decent operational security will increase. > — [Bender on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109976) > This looks like a very narrow ruling regarding copyright. It doesn't guarantee that EU bureaucrats won't try to ban VPNs that don't verify user age (for starters to make NPCs support the bans, then they will inevitably attempt to enforce some kind of KYC or logging to "catch terrorists and pedos".) > — [lII1lIlI11ll on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110521) > Probably should have put a `>` before the first paragraph, because it reads like an 8/8 bait and most people won't continue to the next one. Regarding the misleading podcast claims, at least all the podcast and youtube ads made the VPNs popular on the mass market so now they are more difficult to be silently outlawed. > — [yreg on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109818) > Hurray and good. A technology shouldn’t be treated as unlawful simply because it can be used to bypass restrictions. Restrictions which are stupid in the first place in the majority. I hope VPNs are not becoming the next battleground between online safety and civil liberties. I'm sick of the current ongoing attacks on civil liberties in the Western World under the fake veil of online safety. > — [raychis on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110552) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109440) · 124 points · 165 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - ['VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark Anne Frank copyright ruling](https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-anne-frank-copyright-ruling-cu84ursaj) · Hacker News · 4 upvotes · 0 comments - [Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy](https://daily.dev/posts/denmark-takes-a-viking-swing-at-vpn-enabled-piracy-yd85ot7b9) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition \* TorrentFreak](https://daily.dev/posts/french-court-orders-popular-vpns-to-block-more-pirate-sites-despite-opposition-torrentfreak-ldbjo5ha6) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#vpn](https://daily.dev/tags/vpn) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta"},"datePublished":"2026-07-30T13:52:06.320Z","dateModified":"2026-07-30T15:00:50.930Z","description":"The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that VPN providers are not liable for copyright infringement when users bypass geo-blocking restrictions....","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--1KxV4ohY--/f_auto/v1722860400/public/Placeholder%2007","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--1KxV4ohY--/f_auto/v1722860400/public/Placeholder%2007","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-copyright-ruling-ksbjzxpta","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"privacy,vpn","timeRequired":"PT1M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"}]} ```