Territoriality of Copyright Law

Jurisdiction (from Latin iuris dicere) is the general authority of a sovereign to implement legal rules that normatively affect the behavior of individuals. The scope of jurisdiction of a particular sovereign is traditionally delimited in law on a territorial basis. On the Internet, however, territory plays a significantly different role than in the offline environment, and this difference represents an evolving challenge for legal scholars as well as for practicing lawyers. In this chapter, we discuss the territorial scope of the application of copyright law on the Internet. We analyze the concept of the territoriality of copyrights as such and discuss particular regulatory paradoxes that arise from a strictly territorial application of various components of copyright law on the Internet. We also focus on the concept of the place of use of copyrighted work and the related concept of the place of damage (locus delicti), and we consequently discuss the legal nature of geoblocking tools and question their understanding as specifically legally protected “technical measures.”