The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled in Case C-788/24 that a VPN is a lawful technical tool, and that the fact users can get around geo-blocking does not, on its own, make a publisher liable for copyright infringement. The court also said VPN providers do not share liability for users who bypass those restrictions.
A copyright dispute rooted in the Anne Frank manuscripts
The case grew out of an online academic edition of Anne Frank diary manuscripts. According to the report, copyright status for the material is not uniform across the European Union. In Belgium and roughly 60 other countries, the manuscripts have already entered the public domain and can be used freely. In the Netherlands, however, parts of the content remain under copyright protection until 2037.
To make the historical material available to a broader audience, a group of Dutch and Belgian academic institutions, including the Anne Frank Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, or KNAW, published a free online scholarly edition. To respect those territorial copyright differences, they placed the servers in Belgium and used geo-blocking to deny access from Dutch IP addresses. Users connecting from the Netherlands were shown an explanatory page instead of the manuscript itself.
Why Anne Frank Fonds sued
Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright in the Netherlands, challenged that setup in court. Its argument was straightforward: VPN tools are easy to obtain and simple to use, so a Dutch user could activate a VPN, appear to be in Belgium, and then access material that remains protected under Dutch copyright law.
On that basis, Anne Frank Fonds argued that the geo-blocking used by the academic institutions was ineffective in practice. In its view, the site was still communicating copyrighted works to the Dutch public and should therefore be held liable for infringement.
The court: circumvention does not automatically void the protection
The EU court rejected that reasoning. It said that even if geo-blocking measures can, unavoidably, be circumvented, the mere fact that someone is able to bypass them cannot by itself prove that the protective measures failed.
The court’s logic turned on the standard applied to the publisher. If the publisher uses state-of-the-art geo-blocking technology, it has met a reasonable duty of control. Liability does not arise simply because some readers manage to evade the restrictions through a VPN. By the same token, a copyright holder cannot rely only on the existence of VPN services to argue that the protection was wholly ineffective. What the court requires is a measure that is reasonably effective, not one that is impossible to break.
No joint liability for VPN providers
The ruling also made clear that providers of VPN services, and similar services, do not bear joint liability for a user’s decision to circumvent access controls. That point removes VPN operators from the scope of this kind of copyright claim.
Why the ruling matters
The decision shifts the practical burden back onto publishers and platforms that rely on territorial licensing. If they want to maintain regional access boundaries, they need to keep their technical defenses current. They are not required to build a perfect wall that stops every possible act of circumvention.
For everyday VPN users, the report describes the ruling as a clear signal. Encrypting traffic, masking a real IP address, and crossing digital borders to view content fall within lawful consumer technology use under the court’s interpretation, rather than automatically amounting to copyright infringement.
TorrentFreak said the judgment is being seen as one of the most important legal wins for the VPN industry in the EU in recent years. At a time when streaming platforms, academic databases, and news publishers all rely on geo-blocking to divide markets and licensing rights, Case C-788/24 sets a practical standard for handling the long-running tension between a borderless internet and territorial copyright law.