Secondary liability occurs when an entity facilitates, makes material contributions to, or is otherwise responsible for violating a law or the right of another party. In the case of Internet service providers (ISPs), determining liability for the actions of users is still a topic of lively debate due to the open and evolving architecture of the Internet.

Statutes issued over the past 20 years in the US (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998) and the European Union (the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000/31) provide ISPs with some immunity, as long as certain conditions are met. Using as an example the European Directive, a shield from liability is created for some types of intermediary activity (for example, when the ISP acts as a “mere conduit” and when caching or hosting activities are performed), thus giving the service provider a degree of protection from both civil and criminal legal risks.

Beyond those seminal rules, internationally agreed-upon juridical standards remain scarce, and the effective handling of secondary liability issues requires interpretation under a broad range of national specificities. This is especially true in those cases where technology and market practices have driven ISPs and other content providers to work in new ways, which are harder to categorize within existing law.

This book offers a very comprehensive analysis of doctrinal structure and court decisions across several nations that, once read in a collective way, contribute to the identification of common aspects and transnational behaviors that emerge in the absence of hard international law.

Readers will find out how ISPs are considered liable for the conduct of others within different national contexts, under a broad set of situations ranging from copyright and intellectual property protection to defamation, hate speech, and other types of crime. Although this is clearly a book written by legal experts for other legal experts, students and practitioners in computing and electronic commerce could read it with interest, especially when summaries of legal precedents deriving from court decisions are given that often relate to situations present in everyday life.

What comes out after reading this book is that the Internet is by no means an unregulated space, but instead a highly regulated one. The practical problem is that actors often operate under different jurisdictions, and the adaptation of existing law to an evolving technology can lead to inconsistencies and mixed interpretations.