Human Rights Outsourcing in EU Platform Regulation – Copyright Perspectives

Speaker: Prof. Martin Senftleben (IViR, University of Amsterdam)
Chair: Prof. Christophe Geiger (Director of ILEO, Luiss Guido Carli)
Date and Time: Nov 19th, 2024, 15:00 – 16:30hrs.
Aula 15 – Via Parenzo
https://luiss.webex.com/luiss/j.php?MTID=m7dc7f726934985d8d7582c712be48e84
 

Please register and confirm your attendance at ileo@luiss.it (mandatory for externals to enter the Luiss Premises)

Abstract

With the shift from the traditional safe harbour for hosting to statutory content filtering and licensing obligations in Article 17 of the CDSM Directive, EU copyright law has substantially curtailed the freedom of users to upload and share their content creations. Seeking to avoid overbroad inroads into freedom of expression, EU law obliges online platforms and the creative industry to take into account human rights when coordinating their content filtering actions. Platforms must also establish complaint and redress procedures for users. The European Commission will initiate stakeholder dialogues to identify best practices. These “safety valves” in the legislative package, however, may prove to be mere fig leaves. Instead of safeguarding human rights, the EU legislator outsources human rights obligations to the platform industry. At the same time, the burden of policing content moderation systems is imposed on users who are unlikely to bring complaints in each individual case. The Digital Services Act rests on a similar – equally problematic – approach. Against this backdrop, the talk addresses the risk of human rights interference, which is exacerbated by the fact that the Court of Justice, in its Poland decision, upheld the regulatory approach underlying Article 17 of the CDSM Directive, rather than exposing and discussing the corrosive effect of human rights outsourcing

Click here for the research. 

About the Speaker

Martin Senftleben is Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director, Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. His activities focus on the reconciliation of private intellectual property rights with competing public interests of a social, cultural or economic nature. Current research topics include generative AI systems and author remuneration; open science and digital autonomy of researchers; platform and digital ecosystem regulation; copyright data improvement and content recommender systems; quality journalism and the economic viability of public interest media; behavioural advertising and consumer empowerment; the development of sustainable intellectual property policy.

Professor Senftleben is a member of the Benelux Council for Intellectual Property and a former member of the Copyright Advisory Committee of the Dutch State. He provided advice to WIPO in copyright, trademark and unfair competition projects. For the European Commission, he prepared studies on data access and reuse in research contexts. He is a member of the Trademark Law Institute (TLI), the European Copyright Society (ECS) and the Executive Committee of the Association littéraire et artistique internationale (ALAI). As a visiting professor, he was invited to the National University of Singapore, the Engelberg Center at NYU Law School, the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, Tel Aviv University and the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Xiamen University. His numerous publications include Copyright, Limitations and the Three-Step Test (2004), European Trade Mark Law (with Annette Kur, 2017), The Copyright/Trademark Interface (2020) and Generative AI and Author Remuneration (2023). As a guest lecturer, he provides courses at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), the Jagiellonian University Krakow and the University of Catania.