Upphovsrätten - och ansvarsfrihetsregleringen för internettjänsteleverantörer

Sammanfattning: Internet Service Providers (ISP:s) have been widely discussed in the ambit of copyright law. This group of service providers is namely, from many points of view, more interesting to pursue, when it comes to illicit material posted on the internet, than the actual source of the content. The increased difficulty to find the actual perpetrator is a contributory reason for why cop-yright owners choose to sue the ISP, since ISP:s normally are easier to locate and, most importantly, are seen as more lucrative targets for litigation. This, and the diverging laws in the Member States of the European Union regarding liability for ISP:s, lead to the adoption of the so called E-commerce directive. The directive is to some extent inspired by similar rules in the US Copyright Act which were inserted by the adoption of the Digital Millenium and Copyright Act in 1998. The so called safe harbours in the directive means that internet service providers under certain conditions can-not be subject to liability when it comes to, among others, copyright in-fringements. The E-commerce directive is, from many points of view, far from clear and precise when it comes to its application and interpretation. This regards, not least, the rules concerning the freedom from liability with respect to ISP:s. This is apparent from both diverging statements in the literature, but also from various travaux prépartoires. A contributory reason could be the ab-sence of case law. The aim with this paper is therefore to illustrate and ex-plain the scope of application of the so called safe harbours in the E-commerce directive and the corresponding Swedish law, E-handelslagen. The wide amount of illicit copies on the internet has furthermore engaged several states to try to negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement agreement, the so called ACTA-agreement. The European Union is a nego-tiating party to the agreement. One could therefore ask oneself how the AC-TA-agreement will impact on future regulation of ISP-liability. The agree-ment has not been ratified yet by the European Union.