From what I’ve heard from my German friends the network owner, so the one paying the isp bill, is responsible for whatever happens on the network. If someone broke in onto your network and downloaded illegal stuff, you are still liable for the fines as you should have protected your network sufficiently. Maybe you can get away with it if you are able to present hard evidence your sufficiently protected network was broken in to.
It’s the same with speed cam tickets. If you prove in court someone else was driving your car, you won’t have to pay the fine. If you are unable to, you are liable.
Imo it goes against the law. There’s this thing called “innocent until proven guilty”, so the burden of proof lies with the authorities, not with you. But sadly it’s not always the case. This did cause a lot of legal fights though, and to my knowledge this caused the German police to flash cars from the front now, so the driver would be visible in the photo in most situations.
Germany does not have “innocent until proven guilty”. It has “guilty until someone else is proven guilty”. They will always find someone who has to pay compensation. There is no “we don’t know who did it because of an anonymizer service”, they will just make the anonymizer service pay instead.
Except when law says they don’t have to. Right now the law is that registered service providers can’t be fined on behalf of their customers, and there isn’t a law saying they have to be able to identify the customers. So VPNs get by.
From what I’ve heard from my German friends the network owner, so the one paying the isp bill, is responsible for whatever happens on the network. If someone broke in onto your network and downloaded illegal stuff, you are still liable for the fines as you should have protected your network sufficiently. Maybe you can get away with it if you are able to present hard evidence your sufficiently protected network was broken in to.
It’s the same with speed cam tickets. If you prove in court someone else was driving your car, you won’t have to pay the fine. If you are unable to, you are liable.
Imo it goes against the law. There’s this thing called “innocent until proven guilty”, so the burden of proof lies with the authorities, not with you. But sadly it’s not always the case. This did cause a lot of legal fights though, and to my knowledge this caused the German police to flash cars from the front now, so the driver would be visible in the photo in most situations.
Germany does not have “innocent until proven guilty”. It has “guilty until someone else is proven guilty”. They will always find someone who has to pay compensation. There is no “we don’t know who did it because of an anonymizer service”, they will just make the anonymizer service pay instead.
Except when law says they don’t have to. Right now the law is that registered service providers can’t be fined on behalf of their customers, and there isn’t a law saying they have to be able to identify the customers. So VPNs get by.