Major online platforms, emerging and specialised platforms, players in the advertising industry, fact-checkers, research and civil society organisations delivered a strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation following the Commission’s Guidance of May 2021. Signatories committed to take action in several domains, such as; demonetising the dissemination of disinformation; ensuring the transparency of political advertising; empowering users; enhancing the cooperation with fact-checkers; and providing researchers with better access to data.
The Regulation aims to ensure the smooth functioning of the digital single market by addressing the misuse of hosting services for terrorist purposes. The Regulation establishes a definition of ‘terrorist content’ for preventative purposes, in connection with the definitions of relevant offences under Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council. It also includes an exception regarding material disseminated for educational, journalistic, artistic or research purposes or for awareness-raising purposes against terrorist activity. The Regulation applies to all providers of relevant services offered in the Union, irrespective of the country of their main establishment. A hosting service provider should be considered offering services in the Union if it enables natural or legal persons in one or...
Article 8(3) provides that “Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right.”
The Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive lays down additional provisions harmonizing EU copyright law, particularly with regards to digital and cross-border uses of protected subject matter. Of particular interest for internet intermediary liability issues is the new legal regime for ‘online content-sharing service providers’ (OCSSP). An OCSSP is defined as “a provider of an information society service of which the main or one of the main purposes is to store and give the public access to a large amount of copyright-protected works or other protected subject matter uploaded by its users, which it organizes and promotes for profit-making purposes.” Some specific types of providers, though, are left out of the scope for the purposes of the Directive, namely “not-for-profit online encyclopedias, not-for...
The EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) was adopted in November 2018, aiming to better reflect the digital age and create a more level playing field between traditional television and newer on-demand and video-sharing services. The Directive encompasses a series of duties of so-called video sharing platforms (VSPs) concerning the prevention and moderation of content that constitutes hate speech and child pornography, affects children’s physical and mental development, violates obligations in the area of commercial communications, or can be considered as terrorist. National authorities (mainly independent media regulatory bodies) are given the responsibility of verifying that VSPs have adopted “appropriate measures” to properly deal with the types of content mentioned above (alongside other undesirable...
The GDPR is a comprehensive overhaul of EU Data Protection law, and replaces the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Because it is a Regulation rather than a Directive, it generally does not require implementing legislation in each Member State but instead applies directly as law. It will automatically go into effect across the EU on May 25 of 2018. The GDPR makes sweeping changes to Data Protection law, mostly in ways that do not implicate intermediaries’ liability for user content. Its provisions primarily instead govern companies’ collection and use of back-end stored data about user behavior. Compliance will affect user privacy notices, data logging and storage practices, user interfaces, internal record keeping, and contracting with vendors, among other things. One guide for in-house lawyers concludes that, under the...