The Territoriality Referendum
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Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law Scholarly Works Faculty Scholarship 2014 The Territoriality Referendum Marketa Trimble University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub Part of the Computer Law Commons, Conflict of Laws Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, and the Jurisdiction Commons Recommended Citation Trimble, Marketa, "The Territoriality Referendum" (2014). Scholarly Works. 905. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/905 This Article is brought to you by the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law, an institutional repository administered by the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Territoriality Referendum Marketa Trimble* Associate Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Blocking injunctions; Copyright; Geographic areas; Intellectual property; Online services; Territorial application; Websites Introduction Internet users are participating unconsciously in an informal—but very important—referendum on the future of the territoriality of intellectual property rights (IPRs),1 particularly copyright. Users cast their votes in this referendum through their use of tools that enable them to evade geoblocking. Geoblocking is used by content providers on the internet2 for the purpose of geographically limiting user access to content, often because of territorial limitations that relate to IPR protection. The degree to which users evade geolocation will influence how governments and the private sector regard the future of the territoriality of IPRs. Although the results of the informal referendum might not result in a dramatic departure from the notion of IPRs as territorially constrained rights, the results might prompt governments to consider novel legal approaches to IPRs and inspire the private sector to develop new business models to bridge countries’ borders and provide greater cross-border access to IPR-protected works. Territorial rights on the internet Since the beginnings of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s, many commentators have viewed the internet as a significant challenge to the territoriality of IPRs. The architecture of the network did not seem to enable an emulation of the territorial constraints that exist in the physical world, and therefore the architecture did not allow the limiting of access to the objects of IPR protection within a country’s borders.3 Although the infrastructure of the internet—cables, servers, routers, switches etc.—is as physical as the infrastructure of other older media and means of communication,4 such as the telegraph and telephone, the internet opened a new and unprecedented space that appeared to be completely devoid of physical substance and territorial boundaries.5 Notwithstanding the excitement about the internet’s ability to defy territorial limits and challenge territorial regulation, some commentators doubted that the internet would bring an end to the territoriality * The author thanks Andrew Martineau and Chad Schatzle at the Wiener-Rogers Law Library of the William S. Boyd School of Law for excellent research support and Gary A. Trimble for valuable editing suggestions. 1 The territoriality of IPRs means that IPRs exist only within the limits of the prescriptive jurisdiction of each country whose national laws create the IPRs. 2 This article uses the term “internet” to refer to the worldwide network of interconnected devices, regardless of the protocol used for a connection. 3 On the origins of Internet architecture, see, for example, Baran Paul, “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks”, August 1964, RAND Corporation, Memorandum RM-3420-PR; Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Jack L. Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.22–23. 4 For an illuminating and accessible description of the physical infrastructure of the internet, see Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). 5 For an overview of the early discussions about the internet, see Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Private International Law and the Internet, 2nd edn (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International, 2012), pp.1–3. (2014) 6 W.I.P.O.J., Issue 1 © 2014 Thomson Reuters (Professional) UK Limited and Contributors 89 90 The WIPO Journal principle of IPRs.6 These commentators correctly predicted that, with sufficiently strong interests at stake, the architecture of the network would yield to the territoriality principle, and means would eventually emerge to allow a replication on the internet of the territorial limitations of the physical world.7 The interests were indeed very strong, and countries would not relinquish their power to regulate and enforce their laws simply because the internet space overlapped with their sovereign territory and also happened to be borderless.8 Instead of hesitating to regulate activities on the internet, countries asserted jurisdiction over internet activities without any territorial limits. In what was termed the rule of “cyberlaw 2.0”,9 countries prescribed their laws with de facto global effect on the internet. To the extent that they could, they also enforced their laws on the internet globally. It was in the shadow of cyberlaw 2.0 that important technologies—geolocation technologies—proliferated to enable internet actors such as content providers and intermediaries to identify the physical locations from which users connect to the internet.10 Propelled by various motivations, including a benign desire to offer localised advertising and detect potential credit card fraud, the technologies initially used internet protocol (IP) addresses, and later additional data points, to localise users in the physical world.11 The technologies make it possible to supply local content—for example, to display advertisements that are geographically tailored to an internet user’s physical location and assist in fraud prevention. Geolocation also facilitated geoblocking—the blocking of access to internet content to users connecting to the internet from, or outside of, a certain territory. Geoblocking establishes true borders on the internet; it enables internet actors to partition markets for the purposes of maintaining price differentiation, meeting contractual obligations and/or complying with countries’ territorial laws and regulations. For example, sellers of electrical equipment can limit their sales to countries in which their equipment meets required safety and/or other standards, and online gambling providers who are licensed in a jurisdiction can limit online betting to users connecting from that jurisdiction.12 Geoblocking also assists in the effective policing of territorial IPR licensing conditions. With geoblocking, licensing for a certain territory becomes enforceable on the internet, because a licensee can limit access to licensed content to users connecting from the territory for which the licensor has granted a licence. Notwithstanding its many beneficial uses, geoblocking has been perceived as a major barrier to access to content on the internet; yet, counter-intuitively, geoblocking can facilitate greater access to content in some circumstances. For instance, geoblocking enables the territorial functioning of IPR laws—not only laws that remain territorial (that is, national laws that individual countries adopt and implement within the territorial scope of their prescriptive jurisdiction), but also laws that vary from country to country notwithstanding a significant degree of international harmonisation. Because exceptions and limitations to copyright differ in the national laws of different countries,13 the act of posting a copyright-protected work on the internet that is considered fair use in the United States might infringe on copyright in other 6 e.g. Silke von Lewinski, International Copyright Law and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), para.25.33. 7 While the architecture of the internet influences how the law will be shaped, the process is circular and interests of a sufficient strength to shape the law will result in new or adjusted architecture. Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p.3. See also Winston Churchill, Speech at House of Commons (Meeting in the House of Lords), October 28, 1943, available at http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches /quotations/famous-quotations-and-stories [Accessed October 22, 2014] (“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”). 8 e.g. Jack L. Goldsmith and Alan O. Sykes, “The Internet and the Dormant Commerce Clause” (2001) 110 Yale L.J. 785, 785. 9 Michael Geist, “Cyberlaw 2.0” (2003) 44 B.C. L. Rev. 323, 357. For an early prediction of “cyberlaw 2.0”, see Jack Goldsmith, “The Internet and the Abiding Significance of Territorial Sovereignty” (1998) 5 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 475, 483. 10 Benjamin Edelman, “Shortcomings and Challenges in the Restriction of Internet Retransmissions of Over-the-Air Television Content to Canadian Internet Users”, p.2, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/edelman/pubs/jump-091701.pdf [Accessed August 11, 2014] (“To the best of my knowledge, commercial Internet-based geographic analysis tools have been available since no later than 1999 …”). 11 On the use and operation