Does the Duration of the Storage Matter? Live Streaming Providers as 'Online Content Sharing Service Providers' under Directive 2019/790

摘要

Directive 2019/790 provides an articulated regime for "online content sharing service providers " (OCSSPs), defined as providers that-as their main or one of their main purposes-store and give the public access to a large amount of protected subject-matter uploaded by users, which they organise and promote for profit-making purposes. By focusing on the particular case of live streaming platforms, which cache user-uploaded streams only insofar as is necessary to enable transcoding and streaming to end-users and do not preserve the stream for later access, this contribution explains why the duration of the storage at hand is irrelevant under the directive and why, as a result, such providers qualify in principle as OCSSPs and are subjected to treatment envisaged in art. 17 therein.