(prepared by Swiss Institute of Comparative Law for Council of Europe)
This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.
The proposed amendments will introduce a comprehensive notice-and-takedown procedure for service providers. The amendments will include modernization and supplementing the provisions of the Act specifying the conditions to be met by electronic services providers to benefit from the exemption of liability for unlawful content posted by users. Provisions of the Act will supplement the existing notice and takedown procedure.
Cracow Appellate Court, reversing the decision of the County Court of First Instance in Tarnów, found that a blogger is not obliged to monitor comments added by guests to the website he is running. The Court confirmed the lack of liability for hosted content, according to Article 14 of the Act on Providing Services by Electronic Means.
Supreme Court, Civil Chamber (Restricted Access Version Available)
Providing open access to the Internet does not result in liability for content uploaded by anonymous users. The case was filed by Darius B. who anonymously posted a letter to the President of E. Among the comments to his text was one which included personal details and defaming statements about the plaintiff. The police identified the IP of the computer used for uploading the content. It was sent from an open network provided by the City of E. available to the employees of the city as well as neighboring households. It was not technically possible to identify the individual who posted the comment. The Supreme Court found that no liability for personal rights infringement rests upon the city which provided access to the open network nor was it under an obligation to provide technical tools for identifying individual...
The Polish Supreme Court found that the "deliberations that, according to the law, publishing press in electronic form does not require registration are wrong and contrary to entrenched doctrine." Therefore, “the person distributing without registration in the suitable district court, a journal or a periodical on the Internet, regardless whether such a distribution is accompanied by a transmission in print, next to its electronic form, or whether it exists solely in the electronic form on the Internet, suffices to recognize the crime described in art 45 of Press Law as having been committed.”
This Act implemented the EU Electronic Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, introducing intermediary liability for unlawful content. Following the Directive it differentiates between mere conduit, catching and hosting, introducing no obligation to monitor or filter hosted or cached content as well as a basic notice-and-takedown procedure. The Act determines obligations of information service providers (ISPs), rules for insulating them from legal liability as well as rules for the protection of personal data treated by the intermediaries. (1) Definitions. According to the Act, “providing services by electronic” means to render a service by transmitting and collecting data by means of teleinformation systems, at the individual request of a service recipient, without the parties being simultaneously present, while the data are...