On May 11, 2022, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Texas state law HB 20 which allows private parties to sue tech platforms with 50M+ MAUs for their censorship of user-generated content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person”. On May 13, technology lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer...
My Twitter feed tells me that today is the fifth anniversary of the day the Internet “went dark” in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). For anyone who needs a reminder, SOPA and PIPA were pieces of copyright legislation touted by their...
The Internet is full of trolls. So it’s no surprise that notice and takedown systems for online speech attract their fair share of them – people insisting that criticism of their scientific research, videos of police brutality, and other legitimate online speech should be removed from Internet...
This blog post is excerpted from our filing in response to the U.S. Copyright Office's 2016 Notice and Request for Public Comment on notice and takedown practice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The entire filing is available here.
16. How effective is the counter-notification...
At CEIPI, I have co-authored with Christophe Geiger and Oleksandr Bulayenko a position paper discussing the proposed introduction in EU law of neighboring rights for press publishers for the digital uses of their publications. The proposal is included in the European Commission’s Draft Directive on...
Watch out! Fake news is coming to get you! Lock your doors and iPhones, guard your dogs and children, and hold on to your comb overs! But is fake news so bad, and isn't some, all, or most of it legally protected parody?
According to the New York Times, "fake news" is "pure fiction masquerading as...
The French Data Protection Agency, CNIL, is currently before a French court, arguing that Google needs to do more to comply with “Right to Be Forgotten” or “Right to Be Delisted” (RTBD) laws. The EU’s highest court, the CJEU, defined the search engine’s obligations in the 2014 Google Spain v...
With the Second Circuit’s recent decision in EMI v. MP3Tunes, the formerly small body of case law interpreting § 512(i) of the DMCA – the “repeat infringer” provision – continues to grow. Last year, for example, district courts held service providers ineligible for safe harbor for...
The Center for Internet and Society just wrapped up its Law, Borders, and Speech Conference. We had an amazing line-up of speakers and a great set of topics -- the event was a blast, and we are getting enthusiastic feedback from newly minted Internet jurisdiction nerds and old hands alike.
The...
Internet case-law of the ECtHR will soon be enriched. Magyar Jeti Zrt v Hungary is a new important pending case. It concerns liability for hyperlinks in the domestic defamation law and its compatibility with freedom of expression.
The applicant is in the case is an operator of the Hungarian news...
In 2013, in a lecture at Columbia University, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante announced an ambitious vision for the “Next Great Copyright Act.” That vision appropriately included a prominent role for the Copyright Office in helping policy makers work through some difficult issues...