The Digital Single Market Strategy considers e-commerce as a main driver for growth. However, e-commerce still has a significant untapped potential. Thus, instead of taking full advantage of the opportunities of the Digital Single Market, businesses and consumers are too often constrained to their own domestic markets.
It is recognised that harmonising the rules on online sales of goods has one downside, i.e. the risk to have rules on the online sales of goods which are different from the rules on the offline sale of goods. This could mean that retailers who are selling both online and offline would have to apply a different regime and that consumer rights may vary depending on whether they purchase online or offline.
There are no specific EU rules to protect consumers against non-conforming digital content. There are only minimum harmonisation rules on the notion of conformity with the contract and on remedies for non-conforming goods the implementation of which some Member States have chosen to extend to digital content. In addition, for both digital content and goods there are minimum requirements on unfair standard contract terms.
Most Member States do not yet have specific national legislation on digital content. For instance, depending on the Member State, these contracts are considered as sales contracts, as services contracts or as rental contracts. In addition, contracts for the supply of digital content (for example, music, video games, films, cloud storage services, broadcast of sport events) are also categorised differently within each Member State depending on the type of digital content offered.
As a consequence, for digital content, national rights and obligations as well as the remedies for consumers vary within the same Member State as well as between Member States. This is for example the case for the consequences of termination of cloud computing contracts. In France, the courts impose a cooperation obligation upon a service provider to help customers migrate data after the termination of the contract. An analysis of the Dutch provisions on services contracts (under which cloud contracts could legally be qualified) also shows that the provider has a duty to return the stored data received from the customer. In many other Member States, such obligations do not exist.
Businesses may adopt different practices and approaches towards contract law-related differences when selling cross-border. Some bear the additional costs of adapting their contracts according to the laws of the Member States that they target. Others do not adapt their contracts but may shoulder additional costs to assess the legal and financial risk in case of disputes with consumers in the targeted Member States.
Digital content is usually offered to consumers off-the-shelf, on the basis of non-negotiable contracts. The user can influence neither the digital content features nor the contract clauses. Many consumer contracts for digital content include clauses which exclude contractual remedies or limit them severely (for example by excluding liability altogether or offering service credits as the only available remedy). They also include clauses which enable the provider to unilaterally modify the digital content without specifying the conditions for such modifications, or set conditions which do not enable consumers to easily identify that a modification has taken place.
For digital content, the vast majority of consumer representatives favour fully harmonised rules, provided that a high level of consumer protection is guaranteed. The majority of businesses also support a full, targeted harmonisation. However, several IT associations and big companies do no not see the need for such harmonised rules.