INTRODUCTION
On 30 April 2024, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), sitting as a full Court, delivered a landmark judgment concerning the lawfulness of retention of and access to IP addresses for the purpose of combating online copyright infringement. The decision represents something of a reckoning for the ECJ with some of its earlier rulings, in which the Court appeared to severely limit the ability of Member States to require the retention of IP addresses by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This retention is often essential to identify the person who has committed a criminal offence or incurred a civil liability on the internet. In particular, in order to identify someone on the basis of the IP address assigned to them at a particular date and time, that address must be: (i) stored by their ISP; and (ii) accessed in order to be linked to the civil identity data of the subscriber to whom it was assigned. The ePrivacy Directive, lex specialis to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (and before that the Data Protection Directive), prohibits the storage of so-called traffic data such as IP addresses by ISPs, except while necessary for certain operational reasons …
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Daniël Jongsma, The thorny issue of IP address retention and online copyright infringement: The Full Court shows the way in La Quadrature du Net and Others (2024) 61 Common Market Law Review 1607-1632.
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