Doctoral candidate Liudmila Sivetc awarded with Association’s award

​Liudmila Sivetc receiving the award on May 31st, 2017.

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In May 2017, Liudmila Sivetc’s LIS Master’s thesis was honored with Association’s award. The Association’s award is granted by the Finnish IT Law Association, which awards yearly one Master’s thesis in advanced special studies within law. The Finnish IT Law Association works with legal issues in information and communication technologies and advances the overall awareness of these issues by organizing seminars, discussions and other educative events. The Association also supports researches in this field of law, for example by granting scholarships such as the Association’s award.

Liudmila Sivetc has graduated from LIS –program in March 2016 and she currently works as a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law at University of Turku. The headline of the awarded thesis is “Future of Internet News Portals after the Case of Delfi”. The theme of the thesis is whether the internet news portals are liable for slanderous writings of the internet users. In her thesis, Sivetc argues against the conclusion made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Delfi in which the internet news portal was seen liable. According to the ECtHR, the liability of the internet news portals would not oblige the portals to do alterations on their business models. Sivetc proves otherwise, in her own words, by “building on and borrowing from Yachai Benkler's and Jonathan Zittrain's theories and creating a theoretical business model consisting of an article, a product of industrial information economy, and a comment environment, a product of a new networked information economy.” This created business model proves that in order to avoid liability, the internet news portals need to discard this type of business model.