DELFI AS v. ESTONIA JUDGMENT 7 merely technical, automatic and passive nature; instead, it invited users to add comments. Thus, the applicant company was a provider of content services rather than of technical services. 26. On 10 June 2009 the Supreme Court dismissed the applicant company’s appeal. It upheld the Court of Appeal’s judgment in substance, but partly modified its reasoning. 27. The Supreme Court approved the lower courts’ interpretation of the Information Society Services Act, and reiterated that an information society service provider, falling under that Act and the Directive on Electronic Commerce, had neither knowledge of nor control over information which was transmitted or stored. By contrast, a provider of content services governed the content of information that was being stored. In the present case, the applicant company had integrated the comment environment into its news portal and invited users to post comments. The number of comments had an effect on the number of visits to the portal and on the applicant company’s revenue from advertisements published on the portal. Thus, the applicant company had an economic interest in the comments. The fact that the applicant company did not write the comments itself did not imply that it had no control over the comment environment. It enacted the rules of comment and removed comments if the rules were breached. The users, on the contrary, could not change or delete the comments they had posted; they could merely report obscene comments. Thus, the applicant company could determine which comments were published and which not. The fact that it made no use of this possibility did not mean that it had no control over the publishing of the comments. 28. Furthermore, the Supreme Court considered that in the present case both the applicant company and the authors of the comments were to be considered publishers of the comments. In this context, it also referred to the economic interest of an internet portal’s administrator, which made it a publisher as entrepreneur, similarly to a publisher of printed media. The Supreme Court found that the plaintiff was free to choose against whom to bring the suit, and L. had chosen to bring the suit against the applicant company. 29. The Supreme Court found that on the basis of its legal obligation to avoid causing damage to other persons the applicant company should have prevented clearly unlawful comments from being published. Furthermore, after the comments had been published, it had failed to remove them on its own initiative, although it must have been aware of their unlawfulness. The courts had rightly found that the applicant company’s failure to act had been unlawful.