A Tale of Two Legal Regimes: An Empirical Investigation into How Copyright Law Shapes Online Service Providers’ Practices and How Online Service Providers Navigate Differences in U.S. and EU Copyright Liability Standards

Most online communication takes place on centralized platforms operated by private companies. These services are accessible globally but operated by companies subject to national laws, including copyright laws, which vary greatly across countries, creating incentives for online service providers (OSPs) to geographically segment their services. Because copyright law is territorial in nature and licensing markets are often national, scholars assumed that national copyright laws exacerbate fragmentation pressures on online services and drive the use of geoblocking technologies to enforce territorial licensing restrictions on digital music and movie content. This dissertation seeks to understand how copyright law actually shapes the practices, policies, and decision-making processes of OSPs, through interviews with current and former legal and policy staff at a range of globally accessible OSPs, including operators of user-generated content hosting and web search services. It also seeks to understand whether, and to what extent, operators of globally accessible online services take into account other jurisdictions’ copyright laws in their day-to-day operations where they differ from U.S. copyright law’s liability standards and enforcement mechanisms./nBased on interviews, this dissertation concludes that copyright law has both direct and indirect effects on the practices, decision-making processes, and governance structures of OSPs. It finds that the U.S. statutory OSP limitation of liability regime established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) plays a key role in shaping OSPs’ practices. For OSPs that have operationalized its eligibility requirements, the DMCA has become constitutive, resulting in companies adopting staffing structures and training programs to implement the DMCA’s notice and takedown process and using its standards to manage nondomestic copyright liability risk. Some also use the DMCA’s ex-post takedown process to afford national treatment to foreign copyright holders’ works, relying on the internationally harmonized nature of copyright law, and the DMCA’s compatibility with other jurisdictions’ statutory limitation of liability regimes. Contrary to the assumed fragmentary impact of national copyright laws, OSPs appear to be using a part of the U.S. copyright system that is not part of the internationally-harmonized copyright framework—the U.S. statutory safe harbor regime’s takedown process—to mediate complex conflict of law issues, reduce transaction costs for copyright holders, and mitigate the potential fragmentary effects of national copyright laws for users of online services./nAdditionally, it finds that divergences between national copyright laws have differential impacts on OSPs, depending on their level of resources. Some OSPs engage in jurisdictional copyright risk analysis, design and build new products, and modify existing services to minimize copyright liability in multiple jurisdictions. Less-resourced OSPs rely on the DMCA safe harbor regime to manage potential nondomestic copyright liability. This is significant because pending European Union copyright legislation will create a divergence between U.S. and EU copyright liability rules governing OSPs. This dissertation concludes that the new EU Copyright Directive is likely to have a differential and more detrimental impact on less-resourced OSPs but may result in further entrenchment of more-resourced incumbent hosting OSPs. It concludes by considering some of the limitations and safeguards in the pending EU Copyright Directive and how it may affect U.S. copyright law and the regulation of OSP liability globally.

Advisor: Van Houweling, Molly S