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(1) Articles from 12 to 15 provides mere conduit, caching, and hosting exemptions for intermediaries, together with the exclusion of a general obligation on access, hosting and caching providers, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. (2) In particular, Article 14(1) provides that Member States shall ensure that hosting providers are not liable for the information stored at the request of the recipient, on condition that: (a) the provider does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent; or (b) the provider, upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts...

Promusicae sought an order from a commercial court in Spain to force Telefónica, a Spanish ISP, to divulge identities corresponding to IP addresses that Promusicae had collected in its own investigations of illegal file sharing. The Spanish court granted Promusicae’s request. Telefónica appealed to the ECJ in regards the interpretations of the Community Law, Articles 15(2) and 18 of Directive 2000/31, Article 8(1) and (2) of Directive 2001/29, Article 8 of Directive 2004/48 and Articles 17(2) and 47 of the Charter on the limits of ISPs’ responsibilities to assist in criminal investigation versus civil proceedings. Balancing ISP customers’ privacy with content industry’s ability to protect its intellectual property, theECJ held that European law alone does not require ISPs to disclose their subscribers’ identities to...

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.

(1) The ECJ had to decide whether a Belgian collective rights managment organization (SABAM) could require an internet service provider, namely Scarlet and Tiscali, to install a filtering system with a view to preventing the illegal downloading of files. (2) The ECJ ruled that EU law must must be interpreted as precluding an injunction made against an internet service provider which requires it to install a system for filtering (i) all electronic communications passing via its services, in particular those involving the use of peer-to-peer software; (ii) which applies indiscriminately to all its customers; (iii) as a preventive measure; (iv) exclusively at its expense; and (v) for an unlimited period, (vi) which is capable of identifying on that provider’s network the movement of electronic files containing a musical...

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...