Data Protection & Intermediary liability: how do the French do it?

While the scope of intermediary liability exemptions is being discussed in several places around Europe (and beyond), it is interesting to go back to the Overblog legal saga, which a few years ago had been described by some as pre-announcing other popular sagas, such as the infamous Google Spain case (discussed in a previous post … Continue reading →

The EU Commission and its draft Communication on online platforms: sectorial voluntary action and soft law are the winners of the regulatory challenge!

The topic of intermediary liability is a hot topic these days, with different types of institutions already having had looked, or still looking, at how to interpret/amend/improve the EU intermediary liability legal and regulatory regime. The European Commission [EC] fuelled this debate with its Communication of 6 May 2015 on ‘A Digital Single Market Strategy … Continue reading →

MTE v Hungary: is the ECtHR rewriting Delfi v Estonia?

A few months after the now infamous decision Delfi v Estonia of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) [for background, see my earlier post here], the Fourth Section of the Court issued on 2 February 2016 a judgement (MTE v Hungary) dealing with similar issues. Starting with the end of … Continue reading →

Internet intermediaries: How are you? What do you do? What the European Commission has to say

While waiting to discuss with representatives of the European Commission at the first iCLIC Conference this week the implications of its Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe – as well as waiting for the issuing of the Commission’s forthcoming ‘public consultation on the regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the … Continue reading →

On Delfi v Estonia… Is it time to adopt a good-Samaritan style exemption?

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) recently upheld the decision of the First section in the case Delfi v Estonia, which in 2013 found that holding a news portal liable for the third-party comments posted on its Internet news portal did not amount to a violation of Article 10 of … Continue reading →

On malicious webpages, hosting providers… and the myth of technological neutrality!

In an article covering the issue of malicious webpages and what techies call ‘drive-by-downloads’, Huw Fryer, Tim Chown and myself suggest that one solution might lie in the imposition upon hosting providers of precautionary duties involving the systematic scanning of the websites they host on their platforms. [The article will be published soon but is … Continue reading →