Posts about what Internet intermediaries can and can’t do; and how the law rarely gets that right…
This morning’s Westminster e-Forum event on regulating Online Harms contained a particularly rich discussion of both the challenges and opportunities of using regulation to reduce the amount of harmful content we see on the Internet. The Government published a white paper in April 2019 and an initial response to comments in February 2020. A full […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In discussions of the “Right to be Forgotten” it is often observed that Google manages each month to deal with tens of millions of delisting requests for breach of copyright, as opposed to tens of thousands for inaccurate personal data. Often the implication seems to be that those numbers should be more similar. However it […]
Next month I’ll be going to an academic conference on Google Spain and the “Right to be Forgotten” (actually, “right to be delinked”) so I thought I’d better organise my thoughts on why, as a provider and user of communications and information services, the decision worries me. And I am much more worried by the […]
Herewith first impressions of the Government’s proposal to criminalise “Revenge Pornography” since, if it is passed, this will be another type of material that those offering web or other publishing services for user generated content will need to include in their notice and takedown processes. Comments welcome, especially if you think there’s something I’ve missed. […]
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 […]