The European Commission recently published wide proposals to reform copyright law. One particular concern is that the proposals appear to reduce the existing legal protections for sites that host third party content. Under the current e-Commerce Directive, such sites are generally protected from liability until they are informed of allegedly infringing content (Article 14), and […]
Tag: eCommerce Directive
Posts relating to the 2000 eCommerce Directive, which created liability shields for networks, caches and hosts. Various court cases have tinkered with those shields; and there have been several consultations. In 2021 the EU Digital Services Act and UK Online Safety Bill are the most likely to alter them.
The European Commission has now published its conclusions from the consultation on platforms it carried our earlier this year. This included notice-and-takedown: an issue we’ve been working on for many years. When universities and colleges receive an allegation that information on their website breaks the law, they’re forced to choose between supporting free speech (a […]
As its title suggests, the Commission’s public consultation on the regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy covers a lot of different areas. One of these is the rules for on-line intermediaries: at present networks, caches and hosts that carry third party content. Back in 2012 we responded […]
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House of Lords: Online Platforms
The European Commission have recently announced a consultation into online platforms. Last month the House of Lords EU Internal Market Sub-committee invited submissions of evidence to inform the UK’s response. Although the main focus of both consultations is competition issues, they do revisit the question of intermediary liability for third-party postings. At the moment EU […]
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The Judgment of Delfi
In Ancient Greece the oracle at Delphi was notorious for speaking in riddles. The European Human Rights Court’s judgement in Delfi v Estonia is similarly puzzling. Back in 2006 an anonymous reader made a comment on a newspaper website; six weeks later the comment was removed following a claim that it was defamatory. In 2008 […]
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Incentives for Intermediaries
One aspect of the Google Spain judgment I’ve not seen discussed is the incentives it creates for search engines. The European Court of Justice found that under some circumstances Data Protection law entitles an individual to demand that out of date and inaccurate results be removed from the results of a search for their name […]
The Law Commission have published an interesting consultation paper on how the law of contempt of court is affected by the internet. Anything that “tends to interfere with the course of justice” may be considered contempt: the Contempt of Court Act 1981 deals in particular with communications addressed to the public at large or a […]
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Wild West or 1984?
[This is the approximate text of an internal company talk, which I’ve been asked to make more widely available] One of the odd things about how people talk about the Internet is that you’ll hear it described both as “the Wild West” where there are no rules and unlawful behaviour is rife and as a […]
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EU Notice and Action Consultation
I’ve sent in a Janet response to the EU’s consultation “A Clean and Open Internet: Procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online intermediaries”. At the moment the E-Commerce Directive (transposed into UK law as the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002) says that websites aren’t liable for unlawful material (either criminal […]
Article 15 of the European Ecommerce Directive states that Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers … to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. However recital 47 says that “this does not concern monitoring obligations in a […]