This is one for the legal history books. We have definitive proof, well, in Germany, that the word is mightier than the sword.
Earlier this year, a court in Munich, Germany, sentenced an old lady for software piracy.
We all know that baby boomers may not all mellow out as they retire, there are white-collar criminal occupations you can excel at beyond the first social security check.
It is not the age of the lady that made me squint at the news report.
It is the fact that she did not have a computer at the time of the alleged crime, and she had no working internet connection.
She had a subscription, and proof she had no equipment to use it.
Under German law, you are responsible for any use of an internet connection that is in your name.
Compare this to gun ownership, and you will find that you can kill someone without legal consequences. Not too far from here and not too long ago, a hunting rifle went off when the owner was cleaning it during a break.
The bullet killed another hunter, it went right through the heart.
Meanwhile, home users, the people with the least technical knowledge, cannot do anything against a stupid piece of software that believes it captured your IP address as the endpoint of a torrent site download.
Maybe not all is lost because the other day a court dismissed a suit against parents, whose teenage kids had illegally downloaded songs. The court reasoned that the parents had clearly told their children to not download anything illegally.
So, if your good name shows up in a software piracy lawsuit and you have no working hookup, you should try and remember that this nephew of yours was at your place at the time, and you had clearly instructed him to not download anything.
It could just be that a judge might somehow get the absurd nature of the plaintiffs arguments if you state "I had no computer, no WiFi, but my nephew must have managed to download that movie anyway."
If this maneuver won't help, go to a bookstore and buy a copy of Franz Kafka's "The Trial".
[Update 5/4/2016] The blogster has written abundantly on "Germans & the Internet", for instance in German 4 Dummies: Neuland (aka. internet) or Who's afraid of Google? Turns out, lots of people and more recently on the continued desertification of the German internet.
Or this gem: German man writes harmless Facebook post - gets police visit at work.
But the simple fact that individuals who operate a public WiFi hotspot are fully liable for any real or imagined misuse of the access point by WiFi users is the ultimate admission of utter cluelessness by "conservative" German politicians. Of course, things could be worse. If your neighbor borrows your power drill to torture a person or non-human animal, even Germany does not hold you liable.
Enjoy the little freedoms, says the famously grumpy K-Landnews TheEditor.
The current German government still has not got around to remove the liability provision from the latest and greatest bill designed to propel Germany into the top 250 internet friendly countries on the planet.
According to this article, the chancellor wants to put her foot down and make free access happen.
Don't bet on it. The folks who insist on deterring copyright violations might just wake up to the other two time tested stereotypes used to curb internet access: child porn and terrorism.
[Update] Added "Or this gem:...."
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