The 2022 Charles Clark Memorial Lecture
The 2022 Charles Clark Memorial Lecture was the closing event at this year’s altered but well-attended London Book Fair at Olympia London. The annual Memorial Lecture, and Book Fair highlight, celebrates and remembers the achievements of Charles Clark who was a publisher, lawyer, and eminent authority on copyright law.
This year’s lecture was given by Professor Mark D. Cole, Professor of Media and Telecommunication Law at the University of Luxembourg, who took his audience through an interesting overview of the EU’s experience of regulating online platforms and what future legislation may look like. Although a complex and dense topic, Professor Cole gave an accessible and engaging lecture in which he explained how regulation has evolved from the EU’s e-Commerce Directive and Information Society Directive to the recent Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
In a nice tribute, the title of Professor Cole’s lecture “The Answer to Platform Regulation is in the Regulation of Platforms” was inspired by a famous phrase coined Charles Clark and later used as the title for a book of his collected writings called “The Answer to the Machine is in the Machine”. In that spirit, Professor Cole’s lecture continued a fine tradition of highly topical, engaging talks from experts in copyright, which we look forward to continuing next year.