Large-scale copyright enforcement and human rights safeguards in online markets

Abstract

The Internet has facilitated large-scale copyright infringement. Fighting this one case at a time via the standard civil law procedures is costly in terms of time and money. In response, copyright holders have adopted new strategies that they hoped would be more effective at large-scale enforcement. The question is how these large-scale enforcement procedures impact procedural safeguards, most notably due process and fair trial. Empirical research into large-scale recent enforcement strategies has been limited and tended to focus on individual strategies, rather than on comparative analysis across different strategies and jurisdictions. This dissertation sets out to fill this gap. It presents a comparative empirical study of 22 sanctioning mechanisms from eight enforcement strategies in six countries between 2004 and 2014. It adds to the discussion on the regulation of copyrights and can help policymakers by illustrating the effect of choices made in different countries. For researchers in the field of information policy and law, it provides a detailed description of different enforcement initiatives and adds to the studies on human rights. This study shows that copyright enforcement procedures are able to scale-up only by offering fewer procedural safeguards to sanctioned parties. Similarly, procedures that impact on a larger scale provide less severe sanctions. The research has also shown that infringement levels are by and large unchanged, and that enforcement procedures create substantial costs, a significant portion of which are externalized to the state and to third parties.