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 have opened a consultation on “notice and action” procedures (in the UK we tend to refer to them as notice and takedown) by those who host content on the Internet. Since Janet customers may see a different side of the issue from us as operators of the network, it would be helpful […]
Two consultations have come along at once – one from Westminster and one from Brussels – that both seem to recognise the problems with incentives that current liability rules create for sites that host third party content. Under both the UK Defamation Act 1996 and the European eCommerce Directive (2000/31/EC) hosts are discouraged from themselves […]
The Ministry of Justice has published their response to the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s comments on a proposed Defamation Bill. As discussed in a previous post, those comments included a novel suggestion that third party postings on websites be treated differently depending on whether the posting is attributed or anonymous. For organisations that allow such postings […]
After ruling last year on the balance between the rights of copyright holders, users and network providers, the European Court of Justice has now ruled on the same question applied to the case of a hosting provider, the social network Netlog. As in the earlier Scarlett case, the copyright collecting society (SABAM) had asked the […]
The European Court of Justice has set some limits for the sorts of measures that ISPs can be compelled to implement to discourage copyright breach by their networks. Back in 2004 the Belgian rightsholder representative SABAM sought a court order requiring an ISP, Scarlet, to install devices on its network that inspected the content of […]
The latest judgment from the BT/Newzbin case sets out what BT will be required to do to prevent its users accessing the Newzbin2 website that an earlier case found to be breaching copyright. From next month, BT will be required to add the Newzbin URLs to the system it already uses to limit access to […]
Another consultation response: this time to a European Commission review of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC). The Directive addresses a number of different issues around electronic commerce, but the area of most interest to those who run websites or networks is the rules on liability for content in Articles 12 to 15. For networks, the Directive […]