Maurizio Borghi

Search engine liability for autocomplete suggestions: personality, privacy and the power of the algorithm

This article is concerned with the liability of search engines for algorithmically produced search suggestions, such as through Google’s ‘autocomplete’ function. Liability in this context may arise when automatically generated associations have an offensive or defamatory meaning, or may even induce infringement of intellectual property rights. The increasing number of cases that have been brought before courts all over the world puts forward questions on the conflict of fundamental freedoms of speech and access to information on the one hand, and personality rights of individuals — under a broader right of informational self-determination — on the other. In the light of the recent judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in Google Spain v AEPD, this article concludes that many requests for removal of suggestions including private individuals’ information will be successful on the basis of EU data protection law, even absent prejudice to the person concerned.

Online Data Processing Consent Under EU Law: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical Evidence from the UK

This article analyses the results of an empirical study on the 200 most popular UK-based websites in various sectors of e-commerce services. The study provides empirical evidence on unlawful processing of personal data; it comprises a survey on the methods used to seek and obtain consent to process personal data for direct marketing and advertisement, and a test on the frequency of unsolicited commercial emails (UCE) received by customers as a consequence of their registering and submitting personal information to websites. Part One of the article presents a conceptual and normative account of data protection, it discusses the ethical values on which data protection is grounded and outlines the elements that have to be in place to seek and obtain valid consent to process personal data under European Union law. Part Two discusses the outcomes of the empirical study, which unveils a significant departure between EU legal theory and practice in data protection. Although a wide majority of websites (69%) has in place a system to ask separate consent for engaging in marketing activities, it is only 16.2% of them that obtain a consent which is valid under the standards set by EU law. The test with UCE shows that only less than one out of three websites (30.5%) respects the will of the data subject not to receive commercial communications, and that, when submitting personal data in online transactions, there is a high probability (50%) of incurring in a website that will ignore the refusal of consent and will send UCE. The article concludes that there is either lack, or inappropriate standard, of implementation, information or supervision by the UK authorities, especially in light of the clarifications provided at EU level.

Copyright and the Commodification of Authorship in 18th- and 19th-Century Europe

The modern concept of authorship evolved in parallel with the legal recognition of the author as the subject of certain property rights within the marketplace for books. Such a market was initially regulated by a system of printing privileges, which was replaced by copyright laws at the juncture of the 18th and 19th centuries. The inclusion of copyright under the umbrella of property and the dominating economic discourse marked the naissance of a new figure of the author, namely the author as supplier of intellectual labor to the benefit of society at large. In this sense, products of authorship became fully-fledged commodities to be exchanged in the global market place. The transition between the privilege and the copyright-system, and the prevailing economic rationale for the protection of works of authorship, leaves on the background a more original understanding of authorship as rooted in the human need of reciprocal communication for the sake of truth. Modern authorship, as grounded in a narrow utilitarian understanding of authors’ rights, detaches itself from both the economic logic of the privilege system and the rational foundation of copyright.

Knowledge, Information and Values in the Age of Mass Digitisation

This chapter focuses on one aspect of the information age which interprets the plus-trait in a peculiar and to some extent unique manner. This is the advent of the digital format and the digitisation. The chapter first presents some historical facts on mass digitisation, and briefly outlines the role of Google as the major player in this enterprise. It then discusses the rationales that are commonly put forward to justify mass digitisation. Far from representing just another reproduction technology, digitisation is rather the conversion of books into computable objects. The chapter discusses the effects of this conversion on an industrial scale, as well as its implied meaning. It illustrates how mass digitisation alters the meaning of the whole in which books consist. Digitisation is the process of identifying each instance as source of value and securing it in its full computability. Keywords:Google; information retrieval; mass digitisation; value extraction

Online Distribution of Digital Goods: Empirical Evidence from Bottom-Up Cluster Analysis

This paper presents the preliminary results of a wide empirical study on online distribution of digital media content. Specifically, the study analyses the legal regime of a sample of websites, focusing on information such as the licensing conditions imposed on the content, the adoption of technological measures and the policy on collection of personal data. Using a specific ‘bottom-up’ clusterization technique, the data collected reveal unexpected characteristics of the current landscape for online distribution. While it is commonly assumed that content providers tend to be positioned on a continuum spanning from the ‘proprietary’ on-payment model to the free ‘open’ model of distribution, the cluster analysis shows that the landscape is much more fragmented and varied. The paper concludes that websites, regardless of the content they distribute, tend to cluster in four main models of online distribution.