July 21, 2026
The Web Wide Shrug
'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
Europe says VPNs are legal — and commenters are already roasting the next ban attempt
TLDR: The EU’s top court ruled that VPNs are legal tools and that websites aren’t automatically breaking copyright law just because users can bypass country blocks. Commenters were split between celebrating a privacy win, warning people not to overhype it, and joking that lawmakers will try to ban VPNs anyway.
Europe’s top court just handed privacy fans a big, loud win: virtual private networks, or VPNs, are lawful tools, not shady outlaw gadgets by default. The ruling came out of a surprisingly dramatic fight over Anne Frank’s diary, where a Belgian academic site tried to block Dutch visitors because copyright rules differ by country. The court basically said: if the publisher used modern blocking tools, it isn’t automatically at fault just because someone clicked on a VPN and slipped through anyway.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where readers instantly turned this legal ruling into a broader internet culture war. One of the strongest reactions was a giant “let’s not get carried away” from users stressing that this is mainly about copyright, not a magic shield against censorship or surveillance. Another camp zeroed in on what they see as the internet’s original absurdity: trying to build country borders on the “World Wide” Web. That irony got plenty of laughs.
Then came the political doom-posting. One commenter predicted UK lawmakers would still try to ban VPNs anyway, joking they’d need the bill printed out first because they’re hopeless with computers — a brutal roast that perfectly captured the thread’s mood. Others saw a silver lining, hoping this could help future fights over age checks and online restrictions. Even the dry official EU court note got posted like a receipt in the middle of the chaos. The vibe? Relief, sarcasm, and a lot of “good luck outlawing the internet.”
Key Points
- •The CJEU ruled in July 2026 that VPNs are lawful technical tools and that VPN providers are not liable for users bypassing geo-blocking.
- •The case arose from a dispute over a free scholarly online edition of Anne Frank’s manuscripts published by Dutch and Belgian academic institutions.
- •Because copyright rules differ by country, the works were public domain in Belgium and around 60 other countries but remained partly protected in the Netherlands until 2037.
- •The publishers hosted the site in Belgium and used geo-blocking to block Dutch IP addresses from accessing it.
- •The court held that the possibility of circumvention alone does not make geo-blocking ineffective if state-of-the-art measures are in place.