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The Digital Economy Act in the dock: a proportionate ruling

  1. Monica Horten

Abstract

The UK’s Digital Economy Act 2010 contains measures to enforce copyright on the Internet, specifically a two-tiered form of a graduated response.The Act was challenged in the High Court by two of the UK’s biggest Internet Service Providers (ISP), who obtained a Judicial Review of the copyright enforce- ment provisions. This paper is an overview of the case, based on the hearing of March 2011 and the ensuing judgement. It focuses on the two most hotly contested grounds for the challenge, namely an al- leged failure to notify the European Commission under the Technical Standards Directive, and the pro- portionality or otherwise of the contested provisions. It observes how the judgement accepted the defence argumentation of the government and the copyright owners as interested parties, and how the ISPs appeared to be put on the back foot.

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Any party may pass on this Work by electronic means and make it available for download under the terms and conditions of the Digital Peer Publishing License. The text of the license may be accessed and retrieved at http://www.dipp.nrw.de/lizenzen/dppl/dppl/DPPL_v2_en_06-2004.html.

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