THE DSA IS ADOPTED BY THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

The final text approved by the legislators amends some previous proposals that would have made the fight against illegal content more difficult than it already was under the E-Commerce Directive of 2000. This new Digital Services Act provides a more coherent legal framework that will allow European content sector (as the publishing industry) to continue protecting their content online.

This new regulation also impose some additional obligations to the largest online services to prevent the publishers’ content can be protected online and that illegal uses of their products are removed on the websites.

The Digital Services Act enforces obligations upon the biggest online gatekeepers, prohibiting some of anti-competitive practices and preventing them from harming the content market and their competitors, which in most of the cases are SME booksellers or publishers.

Peter Kraus vom Cleff, President of FEP, declared “Europe is showing once again its willingness to regulate the online world, but the DSA does not fix the significant issue which is the spread of illegal content online. I regret that it does not include stronger tools to fight illegal content, such as a fair notice-and-stay-down mechanism. The DSA can only be a first step which the European Union will need to follow-up on in the future to actually ensure that illegal content online does not reappear after being removed”.

Jean-Luc Treutenaere, EIFB Co-President, declared “We have been calling for a European piece of legislation like the DMA for many years, following decades of unfair practices by large online platforms acting as digital gatekeepers. We therefore welcome the adoption of these long-overdue rules and obligations, which will be hugely beneficial for the entire book sector and ensure fairer competition in the digital world”.