Digital Law & Internet Policy
EU Court Declares VPNs Lawful Tools in Landmark Copyright Ruling
The Court of Justice of the European Union has settled one of the most persistent disputes on the modern internet: the use of virtual private networks to bypass geo-blocking on copyrighted content. In a ruling centered on the contested digital republication of Anne Frank's diary, the court held that VPN operators are not liable for copyright infringement, and that publishers who deploy state-of-the-art geo-blocking measures satisfy their legal obligations even when users find ways around them.
What the case was really about
Many of us treat a VPN as a simple privacy utility — a way to send traffic through an encrypted tunnel so that the website you visit sees only the tunnel's exit point, not your true location. That same mechanism, however, lets a reader in one country pull content that a publisher has deliberately locked to another country. Copyright law, by contrast, is territorial: the terms of a license granted in France need not apply in Germany, and vice versa. The legal question was whose problem it is when the technical and the territorial mismatch.
The dispute reached the EU's top court through the Anne Frank diary, a work whose copyright status differs across member states. The Anne Frank Fund had geo-blocked its website to prevent unauthorized downloads outside its licensed territories. The court was asked whether the existence of VPNs — and the readers who use them — could be used to argue that the publisher's geo-blocking was ineffective, or even that the VPN itself became a party to infringement.
The court said no to both. VPN providers are, in its words, lawful technical tools. They operate the underlying infrastructure of encrypted transport; they do not direct the content their users access. Likewise, a publisher who has put in place genuine, state-of-the-art geo-blocking is not liable simply because determined users can circumvent it. Liability is judged by the safeguards the rights holder implements, not by the ingenuity of the people trying to evade them.
How geo-blocking actually works — and why it is imperfect by design
Geo-blocking is built on a chain of inferences: a request arrives at a server, the server reads the sender's IP address, looks that address up in a geolocation database, and then decides whether the requesting country holds a valid license for the requested work. A VPN breaks this chain at the source: the request arrives from the VPN's server, whose IP resolves to wherever that server sits. To the publisher, the reader simply appears to be standing in a different country.
That is why the ruling is not a blanket pass for publishers to do nothing. The court's "state-of-the-art" standard means basic IP-location checks are expected; publishers that have made a real effort to restrict by territory have discharged their duty. The limitation is structural rather than moral. Geo-blocking and copyright are both fundamentally territorial, while the internet and its tools are deliberately not. No amount of blocking at one layer fully closes the gap, because users can route around it at another.
Why this matters beyond a single case
The decision provides the first EU-level judicial test for when location-inference systems count as adequate protection of territorial rights. Its reach extends well past publishing: streaming platforms, academic journals, advertising systems that must comply with regional regulations, and age-gating services all rely on the same IP-geolocation architecture. A publisher in any of those sectors can now point to this ruling when defending the legitimacy of geo-blocked offerings and pushing back against demands to make VPNs themselves answerable for the content that flows over them.
There is, of course, a tension embedded in the outcome. The same mechanism the court protects — encrypted tunnels that conceal a user's location — is also the mechanism defenders of digital rights rely on to access information behind state censorship and surveillance. Recognizing VPNs as lawful is consistent with that role, but it also leaves the underlying mismatch unresolved: a global network asked to enforce a patchwork of national licenses will always have seams, and the court has simply drawn the line of responsibility on one side of it.
Knowledge takeaway: The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that VPN providers are not liable for copyright infringement committed by their users; publishers who deploy state-of-the-art geo-blocking satisfy their legal duty even if users circumvent it; the ruling supplies the first EU-level test for when IP-based location restrictions are legally adequate, with implications for streaming, publishing, advertising and age-gating across the EU.