Intermediary publishers and European data protection: Delimiting the ambit of responsibility for third-party rights through a synthetic interpretation of the EU acquis

David Erdos

doi:10.1093/ijlit/eay007

Abstract

Some of research presented in this work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/M010236/1),

Highlights

The dramatic shift of our lives online has presaged revolutionary changes in the scale and nature of the publication of all sorts of information or data including that related to identified or identifiable natural persons
Seeking to synthetically balance the competing purposes which underlie these three legal frameworks, this article argues that greater responsibility should flow from more autonomous control but that some shielding is still necessary for all intermediary publishers
These original publishers often publish personal data relating to themselves and to third-party natural persons and it is with this latter category that this article concerns itself

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The dramatic shift of our lives online has presaged revolutionary changes in the scale and nature of the (indeterminate) publication of all sorts of information or data including that related to identified or identifiable natural persons (hereinafter ‘personal data’). ‘simple’ hosting services, sometimes with additional tool integration, dominated the scene.[16] The development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and mobile apps in the 2000s and 2010s saw ‘online’ emerge into a truly mass phenomenon and presaged the development of new types of powerful and significantly autonomous intermediary publisher, starting with generalized search engines and moving on to the array of profiling, sharing and most social networking services ubiquitous in today’s ‘Web 2.0’ Many of these services have tremendous reach and are underpinned by phenomenal resources.[17] the issues with which this article grapples involve a complex and variegated ecosystem that has come to penetrate ‘every fiber of culture today’.18. CURRENT APPROACHES TO THE APPLICABILITY AND SPECIFICATION OF THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTERMEDIARY

PUBLISHERS UNDER CODIFIED DATA PROTECTION AND INTERMEDIARY SHIELD FRAMEWORKS

Applicability of European data protection to intermediary publishers

Specification of responsibility under intermediary shield law

Specification of responsibility under European data protection

TOWARDS A NEW SYNTHETIC APPROACH

CONCLUSIONS