Judgment of the Court (Third Chamber) of 3 October 2019 (request for a preliminary ruling from the Oberster Gerichtshof — Austria) — Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland Limited

(Case C-18/18) ¹

(Reference for a preliminary ruling — Information society — Free movement of services — Directive 2000/31/EC — Liability of intermediary service providers — Article 14(1) and (3) — Hosting services provider — Possibility of requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement — Article 18(1) — Personal, material and territorial limits on the scope of an injunction — Article 15(1) — No general obligation to monitor)

Language of the case: German

Referring court

Oberster Gerichtshof

Parties to the main proceedings

Applicant: Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek

Defendant: Facebook Ireland Limited

Operative part of the judgment

Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (‘Directive on electronic commerce’), in particular Article 15(1), must be interpreted as meaning that it does not preclude a court of a Member State from:

–    ordering a host provider to remove information which it stores, the content of which is identical to the content of information which was previously declared to be unlawful, or to block access to that information, irrespective of who requested the storage of that information;

–    ordering a host provider to remove information which it stores, the content of which is equivalent to the content of information which was previously declared to be unlawful, or to block access to that information, provided that the monitoring of and search for the information concerned by such an injunction are limited to information conveying a message the content of which remains essentially unchanged compared with the content which gave rise to the finding of illegality and containing the elements specified in the injunction, and provided that the differences in the wording of that equivalent content, compared with the wording characterising the information which was previously declared to be illegal, are not such as to require the host provider to carry out an independent assessment of that content, and

–    ordering a host provider to remove information covered by the injunction or to block access to that information worldwide within the framework of the relevant international law.

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¹ OJ C 104, 19.3.2018.