Mods are you aware of a recent development related to the Digital Services Act?
I want to point out this portion especially:
The note expressed support for the proposal of the European Commission, which defined search engines as an ad hoc category that would be required to take down illegal content once it is flagged to them. At the same time, Didier proposed a few changes to the Commission’s text.
The note asked to remove a part in the text’s preamble providing examples of ‘mere conduit’, ‘caching’ and ‘hosting’ services, categories with different liability regimes established in the eCommerce Directive, the predecessor of the DSA. These examples were overly descriptive for the rightsholders that prefer a case-by-case in court.
Another change would mandate that if illegal content is flagged, not just the relevant web pages but the entire website should be delisted, namely removed by the search results. In the most extreme case, that would mean that if a video is illegally uploaded on YouTube, Google would have to remove the entire platform from its search results.
Finally, a modification to an article would oblige search engines to remove all search results referring to the flagged illegal content, not only the specific website. In other words, the platforms would have to monitor all websites searching for unlawful content.
For search engines, that would entail nothing short of a general monitoring obligation; a principle rejected in the Copyright Directive. By contrast, the rightsholders consider this to be ‘specific’ monitoring, as it is targeted at illegal content that is recognisable via specific electronic patterns.
Moreover, search engines note that, compared to other platforms, they do not have a direct relationship with those managing the websites. Therefore, they might not know if a specific content, like a movie, is provided on a website illegally and on another one legally, as they are unaware of the contractual relationship between websites and the rightsholders.
In other words, the search engine would have no way of knowing if a takedown request is justified without contacting the website owner, which currently it has no way of doing. As a result, search engines might have to establish a contractual relationship with the website owner.
So far, the websites have been liable for hosting illegal content. Still, search engines now fear that by including them in this liability regime, they would become the primary targets for takedown notices, increasing their administrative burden exponentially.