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Performing rights organization LSG-Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Leistungsschutzrechten ("LSG") asked Tele2 to disclose users’ temporary IP addresses as personal traffic data, for the purpose of civil proceedings for alleged infringements of their exclusive copyrights. The ECJ relied its reasoning heavily on the Promusicae case and stated that: (1) Access providers which merely provide users with Internet access, without offering other services or exercising any control over the services provided to users, must be regarded as intermediaries under Article 8(3) of Directive 2001/29; (2) under the principle of proportionality, ISPs’ duty of disclosure gives way to users’ privacy rights in this case, where temporary IP addresses must not be stored for the purpose of civil litigations in copyright infringement cases.

This Report was published as a chapter of the 2016 Annual Report of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (OSRFE), and approved on March 15, 2017 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). It represents the second and most recent thematic report that the OSRFE has issued devoted to the particular challenges presented by the Internet to freedom of expression since its Freedom of Expression and the Internet Report from 2013. This Report reprises and expands on the same underlying principles as the earlier document using new sources of interpretation and referring to contemporary debates like Network Neutrality, Internet Governance, and the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) The Report is divided into four sections. The first section defines the four Guiding Principles that should inform...

This report identifies guiding principles for freedom of expression on the Internet and covers a number of issues including net neutrality, Internet access, cybersecurity, privacy, and Internet governance. It quotes and lists citations to other relevant human rights material. It identifies freedom of expression as a right with particularly strong protection in the Inter-American system (Paragraph 1) and reviews some relevant laws of some Inter-American states. As a general matter, it says, Internet-specific remedies (Paragraph 12), must take into account “the impact the measure would have on the operation of the Internet as a decentralized and open network” (Paragraph 63) and the possibility of Internet-specific remedies such as rapid correction or response rights. (Paragraphs 64-71) Denial of Internet access radically...

The Criminal Court affirmed the lower court’s decision and declared Taringa's stay of proceedings, a site that hosts content uploaded by its users. María Kodama, heir to Jorge Luis Borges, brought a lawsuit against Taringa based on her rights to the work authored by her husband. The Criminal Court decided on the basis of "Rodríguez", applying the same standard to a service different from a search engine. According to the Criminal Court, Google and Taringa are both "intermediaries whose main objective is to serve as a link" and reaffirmed that "there is not an obligation to verify the content ex ante but afterwards in case it is reported". The Court stated that "search engines" (or platforms like Taringa) are responsible for third-party content when they have "actual knowledge" of the unlawfulness of such content. Since...

This landmark case addressed the liability of search engines for linking in search results to third-party content that violates fundamental rights or infringes copyright. Because Argentina had no intermediary liability legislation at the time, the Supreme Court reviewed domestic and international law, and reasoned from tort principles and constitutional or human rights law. Its decision was largely favorable to search engines. The Court (1) repudiated a strict liability standard on the basis of the threat it would pose to free expression rights; (2) held that search engines could not be liable for unlawful content upon notification unless a public authority had adjudicated the material as unlawful, with exceptions for cases of "gross and manifest harm"; (3) rejected any filtering obligation to prevent infringing links...