Collaborative Consumption, E-services and Peer-to-Peer technology: tax and legal issues

The expansion of mainstream Internet usage and the availability of broadband in most of the world and for a large mass of people has totally changed the way the Internet itself, and the World Wide Web especially, is used, consumed, and considered. In the past 20 years the Internet turned from a social and cultural phenomenon to a place where a totally new business models are being forged and tried out. While in the mid 1990s traditional electronic commerce developed business models that were largely compatible with the existing international and European tax law regulations, the 2000s have seen new and disruptive models go mainstream: new and diverse patterns of producing, servicing and consuming have emerged, from Amazon expanding its business into the Kindle ecosystem, to Facebook and Netflix, to peer-to-peer (P2P) networking radically altering the distribution chain of digital content. This research proposal addresses the legal framing and tax law, and copyright law issues that come with the widespread usage of online social networks or social network models in C2C, B2C, and B2B situations, with user involvement in the production cycle (crowd-sourcing, user-as-producer, cooperation of autonomous agents) and with the use of decentralized, P2P networks for the reproduction and distribution of content.