General notions
- Notice and takedown
- The sequence by which a rights holder reports content to an intermediary, which removes it or blocks access to it. It is not a single legal category: depending on the legal order, that sequence conditions a limitation of liability, as in the United States, or forms part of an obligation to operate a notice mechanism coupled with a conditional exemption regime, as in the European Union.
- Limitation of liability
- A rule that, if conditions are met, puts the provider beyond reach for certain claims. It creates no obligation to act, and failing it does not amount to a finding of liability: that requires the ordinary law to be applied.
- Contravention and administrative fine
- Non-criminal sanctions, imposed by an authority or established under a national contravention regime, often carrying a cap calculated as a percentage of worldwide annual turnover and daily penalty payments. They are distinct from criminal penalties and from civil awards of damages.
United States law
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- A United States federal law of 28 October 1998. Its title II inserted section 512 into title 17 of the United States Code, which sets up limitations of liability for four distinct technical functions. Used as the name of a form or of a universal procedure, the term has no legal counterpart outside the United States.
European Union law
- Conditional exemption of the host
- Under the Union regime, the absence of liability for information stored at the request of a recipient of the service, conditional either on having no actual knowledge of the illegality, or on acting expeditiously to remove or block access once knowledge is obtained.
- Actual knowledge
- The state of fact that flips the condition for exemption. Under the Union regime, a notice is deemed to give rise to it where it allows a diligent provider to identify the illegality without a detailed legal examination. Merely receiving a message is not enough, and general awareness that the service is also used to store illegal content is not enough either.
- No general monitoring obligation
- A rule prohibiting the imposition on an intermediary of any duty to monitor the information it transmits or stores, or to actively seek facts indicating illegal activity. It concerns active searching, not the handling of a notice received.
- Order to act against illegal content
- An order issued by a national judicial or administrative authority, subject to minimum formal conditions — legal basis, reasons, identification of the authority, exact addresses locating the content, avenues of redress — and territorially limited to what is strictly necessary. Distinct from a private notice, which is not an order.
- Digital Services Coordinator
- The national authority responsible, under the Union regime, for supervision and enforcement in respect of providers established in its Member State: Traficom in Finland, ANCOM in Romania. That authority does not rule on the legality of any particular content.
- Main establishment
- The criterion linking a provider to a Member State, understood as the head office or registered office where the principal financial functions and operational control are exercised. The presence and use of the technical means necessary to provide the service do not, in themselves, constitute an establishment.
- Legal representative
- A person designated in writing in a Member State by a provider without an establishment in the Union that offers services there. The designation does not constitute an establishment in the Union, the representative may be held liable for non-compliance, and the absence of one opens supervisory powers to every Member State.
- Online platform
- A hosting service which, in addition, disseminates the stored information to the public. It is that qualification, not that of host, which triggers the obligations on internal complaint handling, out-of-court dispute settlement, trusted flaggers and suspension of abusive notices — with micro and small enterprises excluded.
- Online content-sharing service
- A narrow category of Union copyright law, defined by the storage and public provision of a large amount of works uploaded by users, organised and promoted for profit-making purposes. It carries a more demanding regime than ordinary hosting and expressly excludes several kinds of cloud service.
Iceland and the European Economic Area
- Decision of the European Economic Area Joint Committee
- A Union act becomes European Economic Area law only once it has been entered into an annex to the Agreement by a decision of the Joint Committee, and then incorporated into the domestic legal order — the latter possibly depending on a national constitutional reservation being lifted. This is the mechanism by which a country such as Iceland applies, or does not yet apply, a Union text.
- Lögbann
- An Icelandic interim judicial prohibition, enforced by the sýslumaður, the district commissioner. In copyright matters it can prohibit a provider from hosting data supplied by a recipient of the service, irrespective of whether it bears any responsibility for that data. It must subsequently be confirmed by court proceedings.
Network and verification
- Regional Internet Registry
- The body administering IP addresses and autonomous system numbers for a region, whose registration database is publicly queryable. The IANA registry indicates which regional registry administers a given block.
- WHOIS and RDAP
- Two protocols for querying registration data. The first has no mechanism for access control, integrity or confidentiality, and returns free text. The second standardises discovery of the authoritative server, the format of queries and the structure of responses; it is now mandatory for generic domains.
- Status of an address object
- A documentary registry attribute distinguishing allocation to a member, sub-allocation to another organisation, internal partitioning, and assignment to an end user. None of these statuses bears on the ownership of physical equipment, and a vendor’s trading name does not appear in them.
- Autonomous system and routing data
- An autonomous system is the entity that announces address prefixes on the network. The identity of the announcer and of its transit providers can be observed in publicly collected routing data, independently of the vendor’s claims.
- Route Origin Authorisation
- A signed object by which the holder of an address block, as recorded in the key infrastructure, authorises a given autonomous system to originate announcements for it. Its signature is cryptographically verifiable; the announcement it is compared against is not signed, and the object does not establish legal title to the addresses.
- IP address geolocation
- Geolocating an IP address is an inference or a declaration, never a measurement. The only standardised mechanism is a file published by the operator itself, deliberately limited to coarse granularity. The country attribute of address registries has never been given a definition and does not allow addresses to be mapped by country.