On 3 october 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union answered the Oberster Gerichtshof (Supreme Court Austria) that the Directive on electronic commerce, which seeks to strike a balance between the different interests at stake 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;
– 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(thus, the host provider may have recourse to automated search tools and technologies);
– covered by the injunction or to block access to that information worldwide within the framework of the relevant international law, and it is up to Member States to take that law into account.
Vide the judgment:http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?oqp=&for=&mat=or&lgrec=nl&jge=&td=%3BALL&jur=C%2CT%2CF&num=C-18%252F18&page=1&dates=&pcs=Oor&lg=&pro=&nat=or&cit=none%252CC%252CCJ%252CR%252C2008E%252C%252C%252C%252C%252C%252C%252C%252C%252C%252Ctrue%252Cfalse%252Cfalse&language=en&avg=&cid=896105