Governing recommendations and negotiated agreements
Henrik Bengtsson
There are an infinite number of soft law recommendations such as non-legally binding ISP file-sharing policies, e-commerce recommendations, Internet marketing recommendations, and a number of recommendations issued by the Committee of Ministers and the Council of the European Union. Do the recommendations have a social or legal impact on companies and Internet users or are they mere desk products? On the Internet, soft law is created by users establishing open source software code and creative commons licenses, what impact do these developments have on the traditional view on intellectual property rights - do they complement existing rights or do they threat their existence?
