Browsing by Author "Lätti, Samuel"

The purpose of this thesis is to research, whether the Geo-blocking regulation and Portability regulation have brought further legal certainty to jurisdiction issues in the Digital Single Market. This thesis will use the legal dogmatic method to answer the main research question “Has the Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation brought any greater legal certainty to jurisdiction in the Digital Single Market?”. This main question includes two sub-questions. The first sub-question is: “Do the Brussels I regulations jurisdiction provisions satisfy the requirements of legal certainty as to jurisdiction?”. The second sub-question is: ”Do the Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation satisfy the requirements of legal certainty as to jurisdiction?”. The way that the research questions can be answered with the greatest degree of clarity, is to analyse the Brussels I Regulation, Geo-blocking Regulations and Portability Regulations jurisdiction issues in light of the theoretical constructions of legal certainty, that are; clarity and precision, predictability and flexibility. The structure of the thesis is based on these aforementioned theoretic conceptualisations of legal certainty. The reason why these elements of legal certainty, or more rightly theoretical constructs as to what legal certainty is, are being covered and the jurisdiction issues under the Brussels I Regulation, Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation are being considered in light of them, is as they have the closest connection to jurisdiction issues. This method of analysing the jurisdiction issues allows for the separate elements to be handled separately, which helps the thesis proceed in a rational and logical way. This allows for the issue of legal certainty as to jurisdiction to be handled from various different angles, which improves the comprehensiveness of the analysis. Analysing the jurisdiction issues in this way separately from three different viewpoints allows for a good general view to be made of the big picture of the Brussels I Regulations, Geo-blocking regulations and Portability Regulations jurisdiction provisions and is in this way optimal to answering the research question/s, whilst at the same time being attentive to more specific individual elements of legal certainty. The sources of the thesis are mostly European Union regulations, European Court of Justice case law and material related to legal drafting of the regulations. Finnish and Anglo-American sources are used as well as continental European sources, so that the array of sources is as comprehensive as possible. The main findings of the thesis can be summed up thus. The Brussels I Regulation does not perfectly satisfy the requirements of legal certainty on the issue of court jurisdiction, though it satisfies them to a larger extent than the Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation. The Brussels I Regulation on jurisdiction issues is not particularly clear and precise, thereby not satisfying the requirement of predictability that is clarity in relation to many jurisdiction issues, but the Brussels I Regulation on jurisdiction issues arguably satisfies other requirements of predictability, such as stability, to a larger extent. Furthermore, whilst the Brussels I Regulation is not particularly flexible, it is not too inflexible on jurisdiction issues. The Geo-blocking regulation and Portability Regulation have not brought further legal certainty to jurisdiction issues in the Digital Single Market and they do not bring any change to jurisdiction issues in the Digital Single Market. The Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation on jurisdiction issues are not particularly clear and precise, thereby not satisfying the requirement of predictability that is clarity in relation to many jurisdiction issues, but the Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation on jurisdiction issues arguably satisfy other requirements of predictability, such as stability, to a larger extent. Finally, the Geo-blocking Regulation and Portability Regulation are not particularly flexible in jurisdiction issues, but they are not problematically inflexible.