Online content sharing platforms as users of copyrighted contents

At first sight, Art. 17 of the CDSM Directive seems to introduce a Copernican revolution, particularly if one looks at this new provision with the approach developed by national courts in mind. They have assumed that operators of online con- tent-sharing platforms are not users of works made available by their clients, at least until they have specific knowledge of the presence of infringing content on their servers. Art. 17(1) of the CDSM Directive states just the opposite. If one keeps reading, however, this initial impression falters. While Art. 14 of the E-Commerce Directive states that hosting service providers may become liable if they do not co- operate with rightholders and take down infringing content, Art. 17(4) of the CDSM Directive relieves online content-sharing service providers of liability if they cooperate with rightholders to make infringing content unavailable. “For everything to stay the same, everything must change”, as Tancredi said in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. But are we sure that this is the right conclusion? We should be rather cautious, as I attempt to explain in this paper.