The Supreme Court of Lithuania adopted its decision in a civil case No.3K-3-586/2012 ruling that decisions adopted by courts of lower instance were unjustified and finding that the claim of UAB “CAN2 FASHION” company and its manager J. K. to a defendant S. G., who was the manager of the website www.skundai.lt, where comments about the defendants were published, must be dismissed. The applicants claimed that the information published was false and humiliating and thus sought the court to oblige the defendant to withdraw the information from his website and reimburse the non-pecuniary damages caused.
The Supreme Court has emphasized that the obligation to withdraw illegal information that was transferred and (or) kept by the information society service provider may not be equated to the application of civil liability – it is a separate claim and less circumstances need to be established in order to find it reasonable, and the satisfaction of such complaint does not depend on the application and/or non-application of civil liability.
The board of judges interpreted that in order to find a claim to withdraw the information that was transferred and (or) kept by the information society service provider justified, the following circumstances must be established: the illegality of the information (meaning the information may not be published), the fact that the information was transferred and (or) kept and the fact that the defendant is an information society service provider. The court also stated that the concept of illegal information is provided in Article 19 of the Law on the Provision of Information to the Public, and an appropriate defendant in the case on withdrawal of illegal information is the provider of information society services which were rendered to spread the illegal information. It shall be noticed that in such case it is irrelevant, whether such service provider is an intermediate service provider (e.g. one that performs only actions of technical nature), or, on the contrary, one that plays an active role that enables him to know about such data or to control it.
In the case heard the court did not find that the published information was illegal and therefore ruled in favour of the defendant. The Supreme Court did not speak on the civil liability issue as parties did not appeal on such matter and thus the unanimous decision of the courts of lower instances to dismiss the claim in that part was left unaltered.
