What are the conditions under which Intermediary gets an exemption from liability?

What are the conditions under which Intermediary gets an exemption from liability?

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What are the conditions under which Intermediary gets an exemption from liability?

SOLUTION:

Who Are Intermediaries?

• Intermediaries, such as hosts, transitory communication systems, information location tools etc., are widely recognized as essential mechanism in the wheel of exercising the right to freedom of expression on the Internet.
• Most major jurisdictions around the world have introduced legislations for limiting intermediary liability in order to ensure that this wheel does not stop spinning.

Act And Its Provision:

• India amended Section 794 of the Information Technology Act 2000 (hereinafter referred to as the Act) in 2008 and joined the club of nations that limit intermediary liability.
• Though the guiding principles for intermediary liability policy in India are derived from the European Union E-Commerce Directive , such principles have been incompletely, incorporated into the Rules without adapting them to the requirements of India in the current context.

Conditions Under Which Intermediary Gets Exemption:

1. Intermediary may claim that the takedown notice region is not applicable to search engines as they fall within the scope of the exemption offered by Rule 3(3) provision (a). The rule includes temporary or transient or intermediate storage of information automatically within the computer resource as an intrinsic feature of such computer resource.
2. If the system of contextual advertisements has been subcontracted by Intermediary to another intermediary, as a result of which, Intermediary does not have any particular control over the advertisements. Thus he exempted.
3. If the author had not established himself as an affected party then the intermediary will be exempted from liability
4. If the intermediary builds sufficient grounds to claim benefit of the exemption in Rule 3(3) provision (a). This provision is essentially meant to provide an exemption for techniques such as packet switching, statistical multiplexing or any other store and forward techniques.
5. If an intermediary had not appointed a Grievance Officer as required under Rule 3(11) or modified its content policy as required under Rule 3(2) then he or she may be exempted.
6. Intermediary will not get exemption if he or she deletes the comments from the takedown notice intentionally. The comments include the following:

• The comment on the impugned URL is "racially and ethnically objectionable" as provided in Rule 3(2)(b) of the Rules
• The comment on the impugned URL is "hateful" as provided in Rule 3(2)(b) of the Rules.
• The comment on the impugned URL is "disparaging" as provided in Rule 3(2)(b) of the Rules.
• The comment on the impugned URL is "defamatory" as provided in Rule 3(2)(b) of the Rules.
• The comment on the impugned URL "violates any law for the time being in force" as provided in Rule 3(2)(e) of the Rules read with Sections 124A, 153A, 153B, 292A, 295A and 499 of the Indian Penal Code 1860.