Marketplace Liability for Illegal Content

Under Law No. 6563, a marketplace is not required to monitor content provided by sellers or investigate whether the content or the goods or services concerned involve illegal activity. However, its right to remain passive ends once it becomes aware of the illegality.

Upon Becoming Aware

When the marketplace becomes aware of illegal content, through a complaint or otherwise, it must:

• Remove the content without delay, and under the Regulation within forty-eight hours,
• Notify the relevant public authorities.

Failure to comply leads to administrative fines per item of content. The amounts are based on the monetary figures in the Law and are updated annually.

Examples of Illegal Content

• Prohibited or restricted products (for example, unlicensed medicines or smuggled goods),
• Unsafe products or products breaching market surveillance rules,
• Misleading product descriptions and fake discounts; see Unfair Commercial Practice,
• Counterfeit goods; for these, the IP complaint mechanism also applies.

Relationship with Sellers

The marketplace’s removal of content and notification of the seller should be clearly set out in the seller agreement and platform rules. Recourse provisions for losses caused to the marketplace by sellers’ illegal content should also be included. Hosting providers’ liability for user content on other platforms is assessed separately under Law No. 5651.