A copyright fight over Anne Frank's diary just made EU geo-blocking VPN-proof
Anne Frank's diary is public domain in Belgium but stays copyrighted in the Netherlands until 2037. When Dutch and Belgian scholars published a free scholarly edition online and geo-blocked Dutch readers, the copyright-holding Anne Frank Fonds sued anyway — arguing that any reader who slipped past the block with a VPN proved the whole site was illegal. The EU's top court just disagreed.
The EU's top court ruled a geo-block only needs to be state-of-the-art, not VPN-proof, to keep a publisher in the clear. A reader who routes around it doesn't retroactively make the publication illegal — only a genuinely broken block does that.
One HN reader with 8,000+ karma wasn't convinced the precedent survives contact with real money: he predicted courts would rule differently the day a VPN is used to pull pirated football streams instead of a public-domain diary.
Why a Swiss foundation sued over a website only Belgians could read
The site at the center of Case C-788/24 was built specifically so people in the Netherlands couldn't see it. In September 2021, the Anne Frank Stichting in Amsterdam, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Belgian research association published a free scholarly edition of Anne Frank's wartime manuscripts online. The material had already entered the public domain in Belgium, but a portion of the Dutch copyright hadn't expired. So the publishers geo-blocked the Netherlands, keeping the page legal there too, at least on paper.
The Anne Frank Fonds, the Basel-based foundation that still holds the Dutch copyright, took them to court regardless. Its argument: any Dutch reader who used a VPN to slip past the geo-block proved the site was making an unauthorized "communication to the public" inside the Netherlands, geo-block or not. That reading would have made the publisher liable everywhere the moment a single visitor cheated.
The Court of Justice of the EU rejected that on July 9, 2026. A geo-blocking measure that is genuinely state-of-the-art satisfies the "communication to the public" test even when a determined visitor circumvents it; the publisher isn't liable for a reader's workaround. The court did leave one door open: if a geo-block later turns out not to be effective in the first place, responsibility for the resulting access falls on whoever published the work, not on the VPN.
The thread: "this is a copyright footnote, not a VPN shield"
Not everyone on HN read the headline the way TechRadar framed it.
"This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web." — the founder of a video-editing AI startup
He wasn't dismissing the case, just narrowing what it actually settled: whether a publisher hiding behind a geo-block stays liable once a VPN gets someone through it. The court's answer was no, but the ruling never touches whether using that VPN was itself legal.
Other readers doubted the precedent survives contact with a bigger interest than academic manuscripts.
"I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something." — a commenter with 8,000+ karma
A different worry surfaced further down the thread: what a court-approved geo-block quietly licenses publishers to build next.
"This also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material." — a commenter with nearly 4,000 karma
One more voice followed that thread to its endpoint, tying it to the parallel fight over VPNs and age verification.
"Communities will move to be mostly private and small. Era of large social media is done... download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs." — an engineer in the thread
The ruling settles a narrow dispute over one diary's copyright status in two neighboring countries. But the precedent it leaves behind travels well beyond Amsterdam and Antwerp: any publisher can point to it and treat a determined VPN user as somebody else's problem, as long as the block itself was good enough. The next company to test that precedent almost certainly won't be arguing about Anne Frank.
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