| www.eudat.eu | v1.0, June 2014 - Are hosting providers liable for the data that they store? And what about if they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity? Are you sure that contractual liability limitations (eg. in Terms of Service) provide you with the right protection? This module addresses such questions. Download the presentation and find out. Who is it for?: Researchers, Data Managers, General public.

1. Exponentialgrowth
Legal Issues in Research Data Collection and
Sharing: Service Provider Liability & Terms of
Service
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Exponentialgrowth
Service
Part of an EUDAT series on Legal Issues www.eudat.eu
Content generated by
Pawel Kamocki, IDS Mannheim
V1.0 – June 2014

2. Table of Contents
I. Service Provider Liability
II. Terms of Service
III. About EUDAT
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3. I. Service Provider Liability
Regulations
• Directive 2000/31/EC of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of
information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the
Internal Market (Directive on electronic commerce)
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• National implementations

4. I. Service Provider Liability
• Hosting Providers may be liable for the data that they store (link of
causation)!
• The Hosting Provider is not liable on condition that:
• he does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information; or
• upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, he acts expeditiously to
remove or to disable access to the information.
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• This does not apply if the recipient of the service
is acting under the authority or the control of the
provider (employer-employee relation?)
• The liability limitation applies only to Hosting
Providers whose activity is of a mere technical,
automatic and passive nature (no intervention
on the content, no review of the content!)
further reading:
P. Kamocki
(2014), Liability of
service providers
in e-Research
Infrastructures.
Killing the
messenger?

5. I. Service Provider Liability
• contractual liability limitations (eg. in Terms of Service) may provide
for some additional protection, but:
• in some cases they may be invalidated under consumer
protection law (applies to relations between a consumer and a
business)
• they have no effect on third parties (the Hosting Provider may
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• they have no effect on third parties (the Hosting Provider may
still be sued by a third party, and then ‘sue the data provider
back’)
• bear in mind that the Service Provider is a priori more solvent than
the data provider, which makes him an easier target for a lawsuit!

6. II. Terms of Service
• Terms of Service (Terms of Use, Terms and Conditions) may
define many aspects related to the functioning of a service, such
as:
• Availability of services
• Liability of users
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• Rights and obligations of users
• Intellectual property rights of users (it is possible that by
accepting the ToS you transfer or license your intellectual
property rights!)
• Become binding contracts if accepted!
• Normally override statutory copyright exceptions!

7. II. Terms of Service
example Text and Data Mining policies in Terms of Service:
To protect the Products for the research and educational use of Authorized Users,
automated searches against ProQuest’s systems are not permitted with the exception
of nonburdensome federated search services. Data mining is prohibited.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), Terms & Conditions, s. 6b
Text mining access is provided to subscribers for non-commercial purposes
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Text mining access is provided to subscribers for non-commercial purposes
Access is via the ScienceDirect APIs only
Text mining output adheres to the following conditions:
1. Output can contain "snippets" of up to 200 characters of the original text
2. Licensed as CC-BY-NC
3. Includes DOI link to original content
Elsevier ’s Terms and Conditions of Text and Data Mining
Institutional Licensees and/or Authorized Users (as defined in the JSTOR Terms and
Conditions of Service) may use Data for Research to perform research activities
involving computational analysis rather than for purposes of understanding the
intellectual meaning of such content…
JSTOR, Terms and Conditions for Use for Journals, Plants…, s. 2.3

8. III. About EUDAT
a pan-European initiative building a sustainable cross-
disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure
providing a set of shared services for accessing and
preserving research data
EUDAT is...
www.eudat.eu
supporting multiple research
communities by working closely
with them to deliver these technical
services as part of the EUDAT
Collaborative Data Infrastructure
(CDI)

9. III. About EUDAT
A truly pan-European Infrastructure
Research Communities
National Data Centres
Technology Providers
Offering permanence,
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general data centres
community centres representing all the associated
community data centres
Offering permanence,
persistence, reliability and
long term solutions

10. III. About EUDAT
The EUDAT services suite
www.eudat.eu

11. Contact us for more information
eudat-pmo@postit.csc.fi
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The author wishes to acknowledge the
many valuable suggestions made by:
Marc Stauch, Ville Oksanen & Adam Carter
Content generated by
Pawel Kamocki, IDS Mannheim,
kamocki@ids-mannheim.de
Contact us for more information eudat-pmo@postit.csc.fi