Does the Duration of the Storage Matter? Live Streaming Providers As ‘Online Content Sharing Service Providers’ Under Directive 2019/790

Abstract

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 organize 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 Article 17 therein.

Keywords: copyright, live streaming, platforms, OCSSPs, Directive 2019/790, DSM Directive, Article 17, storage