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Proton statement on new Italian draconian laws? (torrentfreak.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The new "Omnibus" law in italy tries to block piracy by basically creating a situation in which you will face jail time if you get caught watching an illegal streaming (or your IP does) and ISP and IP providers (they name VPN and DNS services) will face jail time too if they don't notify the authorities of "illegal activity" done by their users.

E.g. if I watch a soccer streaming from a pirate site, apparently, my VPN provider (in this case, Proton) will have to notify the authorities that I am watching that pirated content.

This is madness in so many ways, starting by the fact that the law implies that both my ISP and my VPN provider must spy my traffic to see if I am watching any illegal content.

I wanted to know if Proton has anything to say about all of this for their Italian customers. How are you guys going to face this? Will you simply stop providing the service? Will you ignore the law because you are not an italian company? Or will you spy our traffic to see if we are watching a soccer game?

I'm quite worried right now about the implications of this law to my privacy. Not because I pirate content but because the punishement for those who don't notify the authorities means that to avoid legal problems, services like Proton will have to actually read our traffic.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

My reading of the article is that providers are "made aware" by the rights holders, not by general monitoring of communications on their network.

It’s true that Article 15(1) of Directive 2000/31 prohibits the imposition of an obligation on an ISP to carry out general monitoring of information that it transmits on its own network.

Sounds to me that, in practice, rights holders will notify providers of suspected infringement, triggering their requirement to report to authorities, and it goes from there.

I'm not sure how this would work for a VPN provider. It seems that rights holders could only notify them of suspected piracy websites, as client traffic would be invisible to them. I also wonder how Italy can enforce their laws on the providers outside their jurisdiction, beyond compelling IP blocking to all non-compliant VPN servers in the world.

I have only performed a cursory, sleepy reading of the article, and I didn't follow the links to the relevant legislation. Happy to be corrected.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sounds to me that, in practice, rights holders will notify providers of suspected infringement, triggering their requirement to report to authorities, and it goes from there.

Yes. You are right. But if hypothethically my ip gets somehow reported, it could trigger this "awareness". Can proton know what I'm browsing?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can proton know what I'm browsing?

Absolutely. Your VPN provider is in a position to know what you're browsing. It's up to us to determine if their track record and public statements align with our values. Ideally, the VPN doesn't log this info.

In the case of the ideal VPN, the rights holders would likely not even have access sufficient to determine if the VPN is connecting to "illegal" sites. That would require the ISP to provide this information to rights holders. In this case, it would seem the onus would be on Proton to take the report and look at their logs -- which don't exist -- and then report the clients (found in their nonexistent logs) connecting to that service to Italian authorities.

My understanding is that this changes nothing for VPN users. The real question is how Italy can enforce it. It seems they would need additional legislation to block access to non-compliant providers, likely at the ISP level. Slippery slope.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Thanks for the reply. Makes everything easier to understand. I guess we're going to see a boom in vpn subs in the next months thanks to soccer mafia.