Miquel Peguera
(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain)

Mercoledì 10 febbraio 2016, ore 17.00 – 19.00

Centro Nexa su Internet & Società
Politecnico di Torino, via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano)
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Under EU law, there is no specific protection from liability for those providing hyperlinks to third-party content. The 2000 E-Commerce Directive chose not to establish a safe harbour for links, or more generally for information location tools. This lack of protection prompted the discussion of whether providers of links could nonetheless be shielded from liability under other provisions of the Directive. In any event, the current safe harbour scheme might prove elusive to deal with linking, particularly in the fields of copyright and data protection, where linking may be considered an illicit activity in itself if it lacks authorization. In the field of data protection, the CJEU has considered search engines controllers of, and thus fully responsible for, the processing of personal data contained in the webpages they link to. In the field of copyright, the CJEU holds that providing a link amounts to a ‘communication’ of the linked content. In the cases decided so far, the court found that such a communication was not made to a ‘new public’ and thus it did not need authorization. Nonetheless, other cases are pending before the court, and it may end up holding that linking to unauthorized content constitutes a communication to a new public, and therefore a direct infringement. This presentation will examine the status of the linking activities in those fields, particularly in view of the new General Data Protection Regulation and of the ongoing reform of EU copyright law. It will also consider the interplay of those legal frameworks and case law with the intermediary liability provisions in the E-Commerce Directive.
Biografia

Miquel Peguera is an Associate Professor of Law at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) (Barcelona, Spain). Affiliate Scholar, Stanford Center for Internet & Society (2014-2016). PhD in Law, University of Barcelona (2006), with a dissertation on the liability of Internet intermediaries. Visiting Scholar at the University of Columbia School of Law (2007-08). His research focuses on the legal aspects of the information society, and particularly on Intermediary liability. His publications include articles and book chapters on copyright, trade marks and data protection. He is a Co-editor of the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law (jipitec.eu). Before joining the academia, he worked as a lawyer in Barcelona.
Letture consigliate e link utili
- Mira Burri (2014): Permission to Link: Making Available via Hyperlinks in the European Union after Svensson, JIPITEC Vol 5(3), 245-255.
- Miquel Peguera (2016, forthcoming): The Shaky Ground of the Right to Be Delisted, 18 Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law.