The final text of the Digital Services Act (DSA)
Preamble 11-20, Digital Services Act (DSA)
(11) It should be clarified that this Regulation is without prejudice to Union law on copyright and related rights, including Directives 2001/29/EC, 2004/48/EC and (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council, which establish specific rules and procedures that should remain unaffected.
(12) In order to achieve the objective of ensuring a safe, predictable and trustworthy online environment, for the purpose of this Regulation the concept of ‘illegal content’ should broadly reflect the existing rules in the offline environment. In particular, the concept of ‘illegal content’ should be defined broadly to cover information relating to illegal content, products, services and activities. In particular, that concept should be understood to refer to information, irrespective of its form, that under the applicable law is either itself illegal, such as illegal hate speech or terrorist content and unlawful discriminatory content, or that the applicable rules render illegal in view of the fact that it relates to illegal activities.
Illustrative examples include the sharing of images depicting child sexual abuse, the unlawful non-consensual sharing of private images, online stalking, the sale of non-compliant or counterfeit products, the sale of products or the provision of services in infringement of consumer protection law, the non-authorised use of copyright protected material, the illegal offer of accommodation services or the illegal sale of live animals. In contrast, an eyewitness video of a potential crime should not be considered to constitute illegal content, merely because it depicts an illegal act, where recording or disseminating such a video to the public is not illegal under national or Union law. In this regard, it is immaterial whether the illegality of the information or activity results from Union law or from national law that is in compliance with Union law and what the precise nature or subject matter is of the law in question.
(13) Considering the particular characteristics of the services concerned and the corresponding need to make the providers thereof subject to certain specific obligations, it is necessary to distinguish, within the broader category of providers of hosting services as defined in this Regulation, the subcategory of online platforms. Online platforms, such as social networks or online platforms allowing consumers to conclude distance contracts with traders, should be defined as providers of hosting services that not only store information provided by the recipients of the service at their request, but that also disseminate that information to the public at the request of the recipients of the service. However, in order to avoid imposing overly broad obligations, providers of hosting services should not be considered as online platforms where the dissemination to the public is merely a minor and purely ancillary feature that is intrinsically linked to another service, or a minor functionality of the principal service, and that feature or functionality cannot, for objective technical reasons, be used without that other or principal service, and the integration of that feature or functionality is not a means to circumvent the applicability of the rules of this Regulation applicable to online platforms.
For example, the comments section in an online newspaper could constitute such a feature, where it is clear that it is ancillary to the main service represented by the publication of news under the editorial responsibility of the publisher. In contrast, the storage of comments in a social network should be considered an online platform service where it is clear that it is not a minor feature of the service offered, even if it is ancillary to publishing the posts of recipients of the service. For the purposes of this Regulation, cloud computing or web-hosting services should not be considered to be an online platform where dissemination of specific information to the public constitutes a minor and ancillary feature or a minor functionality of such services.
Moreover, cloud computing services and web-hosting services, when serving as infrastructure, such as the underlying infrastructural storage and computing services of an internet-based application, website or online platform, should not in themselves be considered as disseminating to the public information stored or processed at the request of a recipient of the application, website or online platform which they host.
(14) The concept of ‘dissemination to the public’, as used in this Regulation, should entail the making available of information to a potentially unlimited number of persons, meaning making the information easily accessible to recipients of the service in general without further action by the recipient of the service providing the information being required, irrespective of whether those persons actually access the information in question.
Accordingly, where access to information requires registration or admittance to a group of recipients of the service, that information should be considered to be disseminated to the public only where recipients of the service seeking to access the information are automatically registered or admitted without a human decision or selection of whom to grant access. Interpersonal communication services, as defined in Directive (EU) 2018/1972 of the European Parliament and of the Council, such as emails or private messaging services, fall outside the scope of the definition of online platforms as they are used for interpersonal communication between a finite number of persons determined by the sender of the communication.
However, the obligations set out in this Regulation for providers of online platforms may apply to services that allow the making available of information to a potentially unlimited number of recipients, not determined by the sender of the communication, such as through public groups or open channels. Information should be considered disseminated to the public within the meaning of this Regulation only where that dissemination occurs upon the direct request by the recipient of the service that provided the information.
(15) Where some of the services provided by a provider are covered by this Regulation whilst others are not, or where the services provided by a provider are covered by different sections of this Regulation, the relevant provisions of this Regulation should apply only in respect of those services that fall within their scope.
(16) The legal certainty provided by the horizontal framework of conditional exemptions from liability for providers of intermediary services, laid down in Directive 2000/31/EC, has allowed many novel services to emerge and scale up across the internal market. That framework should therefore be preserved. However, in view of the divergences when transposing and applying the relevant rules at national level, and for reasons of clarity and coherence, that framework should be incorporated in this Regulation. It is also necessary to clarify certain elements of that framework, having regard to the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
(17) The rules on liability of providers of intermediary services set out in this Regulation should only establish when the provider of intermediary services concerned cannot be held liable in relation to illegal content provided by the recipients of the service. Those rules should not be understood to provide a positive basis for establishing when a provider can be held liable, which is for the applicable rules of Union or national law to determine. Furthermore, the exemptions from liability established in this Regulation should apply in respect of any type of liability as regards any type of illegal content, irrespective of the precise subject matter or nature of those laws.
(18) The exemptions from liability established in this Regulation should not apply where, instead of confining itself to providing the services neutrally by a merely technical and automatic processing of the information provided by the recipient of the service, the provider of intermediary services plays an active role of such a kind as to give it knowledge of, or control over, that information. Those exemptions should accordingly not be available in respect of liability relating to information provided not by the recipient of the service but by the provider of the intermediary service itself, including where the information has been developed under the editorial responsibility of that provider.
(19) In view of the different nature of the activities of ‘mere conduit’, ‘caching’ and ‘hosting’ and the different position and abilities of the providers of the services in question, it is necessary to distinguish the rules applicable to those activities, in so far as under this Regulation they are subject to different requirements and conditions and their scope differs, as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
(20) Where a provider of intermediary services deliberately collaborates with a recipient of the services in order to undertake illegal activities, the services should not be deemed to have been provided neutrally and the provider should therefore not be able to benefit from the exemptions from liability provided for in this Regulation. This should be the case, for instance, where the provider offers its service with the main purpose of facilitating illegal activities, for example by making explicit that its purpose is to facilitate illegal activities or that its services are suited for that purpose. The fact alone that a service offers encrypted transmissions or any other system that makes the identification of the user impossible should not in itself qualify as facilitating illegal activities.
Note: This is the final text of the Digital Services Act. The full name is "Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act)".
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Cyber Risk GmbH
Dammstrasse 16
8810 Horgen
Tel: +41 79 505 89 60
Email: george.lekatis@cyber-risk-gmbh.com
Web: https://www.cyber-risk-gmbh.com
We process and store data in compliance with both, the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The service provider is Hostpoint. The servers are located in the Interxion data center in Zürich, the data is saved exclusively in Switzerland, and the support, development and administration activities are also based entirely in Switzerland.
Understanding Cybersecurity in the European Union.
2. The European Cyber Resilience Act
3. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)
4. The Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER)
5. The Digital Services Act (DSA)
6. The Digital Markets Act (DMA)
7. The European Health Data Space (EHDS)
10. European Data Governance Act (DGA)
11. The Artificial Intelligence Act
12. The European ePrivacy Regulation
13. The European Cyber Defence Policy