Group items tagged

. In e-commerce in particular, market surveillance authorities have great difficulty tracing non-compliant products imported into the Union and identifying the responsible entity within their jurisdiction.

In its 2017 work programme 4 , the Commission announced an initiative to strengthen product compliance and enforcement Union harmonisation legislation on products, as part of the 'Goods Package'. The initiative is to address the increasing amount of non-compliant products on the Union market while offering incentives to boost regulatory compliance and ensuring fair and equal treatment that will benefit of businesses and citizens.

The development of e-commerce is also due to a great extent to the proliferation of information society service providers, normally through platforms and for remuneration, which offer intermediary services by storing third party content, but without exercising any control over such content, thus not acting on behalf of an economic operator. Removal of content regarding non-compliant products or where it is not feasible blocking access to non-compliant products offered through their services should be without prejudice to the rules laid down in Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 55 . In particular, no general obligation should be imposed on service providers to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor should a general obligation be imposed upon them to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. Furthermore, hosting service providers should not be held liable as long as they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and are not aware of the facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent.

Recognising the need for co-operation between States and private industry

need to protect legitimate interests

roper balance between the interests of law enforcement and respect for fundamental human rights

Why? Because (a) everybody has to chip in the fight against piracy - that includes ISPs and IBPs - and (b) because ISPs and IBPs make profit from letting users access infringing sites, and can afford to cover such costs whereas right holders may not. As such, bearing the full costs of injunctions is no 'unbearable sacrifice' in the meaning of the CJEU's Telekabel jurisprudence. 

The unions had asked the ISP/IBPs to block and de-list four websites providing access to protected material via streaming and/or downloading: www.allostreaming.com, www.allowshowtv.com, www.allomovies.com and www.alloshare.com.

The claimants also applied for the costs of the injunctions to be covered by ISP/IBPs in their entirety because they were not in the position to sustain these measures financially.

Article 15 prevents Member States from imposing on internet intermediaries, with respect to activities covered by Articles 12-14, a general obligation to monitor the information which they transmit or store or a general obligation to actively seek out facts or circumstances indicating illegal activities. This is important, as general monitoring of millions of sites and web pages would, in practical terms, be impossible and would result in disproportionate burdens on intermediaries and higher costs of access to basic services for users. [73] However, Article 15 does not prevent public authorities in the Member States from imposing a monitoring obliga tion in a specific, clearly defined individual case.[73] In this context, it is important to note that the reports and studies on the effectiveness of blocking and filtering applications appear to indicate that there is not yet any technology which could not be circumvented and provide full effectiveness in blocking or filtering illegal and harmful information whilst at the same time avoiding blocking entirely legal information resulting in violations of freedom of speech.

At the heart of the initiative is a plan for online platforms to “increase the proactive prevention, detection and removal of illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online.” Significantly, the ideas are presented as “guidelines and principles”. That’s because they are entirely voluntary. Except that the Commission makes it quite clear that if this totally voluntary system is not implemented by companies like Facebook and Google, it will bring in new laws to make them do it on a not-so-voluntary basis. The Commission is quite eager to see swift results from these voluntary efforts, as legislative proposals could already be on the table by May 2018.

But the worst idea, and one that appears multiple times in the latest plans, is the routine and pervasive use of upload filters.

In doing so, they have caused notable collateral damage, especially to fundamental rights.

Beyond the potential negative economic aspects, several speakers at the Copycamp conference rang the alarm bells over the potential fallout of round-the-clock obligatory monitoring and filtering of user content on the net. Diego Naranjo from the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) reported: “I heard one of the EU member state representatives say, ‘Why do we use this (filtering system) only for copyright?’,” he said. The idea of bringing down the unauthorised publication of copyrighted material by algorithm was “a very powerful tool in the hands of government,” he warned.

In contrast to the dark picture presented by many activists on copyright, multi-purpose filtering machines and the end of ownership in the time of the internet of things, chances for reform are presented for various areas of rights protection.

EU copyright reform itself is a chance, argued Raegan MacDonalds from the Mozilla Foundation, calling it “the opportunity of a generation to bring copyright in line with the digital age, and we want to do that.” Yet the task, like in earlier copyright legislative processes, is to once more expose what she described as later dismantled myths of big rights holders, that any attempt to harmonise exceptions would kill their industry.

Non-Americans should not be satisfied with this state of affairs, which basically amounts to Americans fighting with other Americans about how to run the world.

that is, the idea that people should have a say in the rules that govern their activities. The Manila Principles, moreover, place an inordinate emphasis on domestic courts to regulate platforms, even though, as my co-author Keller notes, courts lack the expertise and policy-making capacity to do so.

What all of these proposals have in common, beyond adopting the American free-speech debate as their starting point, is that they treat these large platforms as an unalterable fact of life. They consider the main question to be not whether these platforms should be making decisions for billions of non-Americans, but how they should make these decisions.