Nicolo Zingales

Author: Nicolo Zingales Willful blindness is a doctrine that is used by courts to substitute for actual knowledge, especially in criminal cases, where a defendant could foresee the existence of wrongdoing, but deliberately avoided making an inquiry about it. Black’s law dictionary defines it as “deliberate avoidance of knowledge of a crime, esp. by failing… Continue reading Willful Blindness

Author: Nicolo Zingales Due to the easy duplicability of information transmitted in digital form, copyright holders regularly resort to technical protection measures (TPMs), such as encryption-based paywalls, to prevent acts that are not authorized by the right holder of any copyright or any right related to copyright. The legal system reinforces this type of protection… Continue reading Technological Protection Measures

Author: Nicolo Zingales A safe harbor is an area of exemption from liability guaranteed by the legal system, a ‘comfort zone’ that enables the pursuit of what would otherwise be considered legally risky activities. Safe harbors can be important not only to enable experimentation and innovation, but also, and particularly in the context of speech… Continue reading Safe Harbor

Author: Nicolo Zingales See also appeal.  The concept of ‘right to explanation’ refers to the informational duties owed by a data controller to a data subject in relation to automated decisions based on profiling. The basic provision for the construct of the ‘right to explanation’ is Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which establishes a… Continue reading Right to Explanation

Author: Nicolo Zingales The concept of responsibility refers, in its simplest form, to a duty to undertake a particular action or set of actions. Such duty can be legal, but also moral, social, or ethical. If it is legally enforceable, failing to fulfill the duty gives rise to liability. However, even where that enforcement is not… Continue reading Responsibility

Author: Nicolo Zingales ‘Red flag knowledge’ is a term of art used in the copyright context to infer knowledge on the part of an online service provider without it having received a specific notice (hence its qualification as ‘constructive knowledge’) about infringing activity which it enables. Although US Congress did not explicitly include it in… Continue reading Red Flag Knowledge

Authors: Daphne Keller and Nicolo Zingales This entry provides an overview of the concept of proactive measures, where ‘measures’ is a term of art which includes a range of steps that can be taken as a form of governance or regulation, usually in relation to specific kinds of content or conducts. ‘Proactive’ is a term… Continue reading Proactive Measures

Author: Nicolo Zingales Nudging refers to the use of choice architecture (the nudge) to influence the behavior of an individual or group of individuals (nudgees) without depriving them of the ability to choose a different course of action. The term was coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein with their book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About… Continue reading Nudging

Author: Nicolo Zingales ‘Notice-and-staydown (NSD)’ refers to a system of intermediary liability where, following a qualified notice, the intermediary is required not only to remove or disable access to allegedly infringing content but also to prevent further infringements by restricting the upload on the platform of the same or equivalent content. There is some ambiguity… Continue reading Notice-and-Staydown

Nicolo Zingales Notice-and-notice is a process to deal with potential infringing content, a regime that became more widely known after being established in Canada’s Copyright Act. It is an alternative to the notice-and-takedown model that works as follows: after a decision by the platform to remove content through private notification, the user is given the… Continue reading Notice-and-notice