The KRRiT VOD Register in Poland: Which Influencers Must Register and Who Should Be the Provider

The Origin and Scope of the Registration Duty

The obligation derives from the amendment of 11 August 2021 transposing Directive (EU) 2018/1808, which revised the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. Under Article 47ca of the Broadcasting Act, an entity providing an on-demand audiovisual media service must file a notification for entry in the register kept by the Chairman of KRRiT no later than fourteen days before the public provision of the service begins. The notification is made on the form prescribed by the KRRiT regulation of 21 October 2021, the entry is free of charge, and the register itself is public.

The regulator left little doubt, from the outset, that the provision reached individual creators. In February 2022, shortly after the deadline for existing services had expired, KRRiT announced that channels on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook operated for profit, continuously and in an organised manner fell within the register, a position that prompted an inquiry by the Commissioner for Human Rights. For several years thereafter the provision nonetheless led a quiet existence: streaming platforms, broadcasters and the larger editorial offices registered, while creators waited. The first penalty decisions were issued at the turn of 2023 and 2024, and the 2026 guide represents a further iteration of the same policy, this time framed expressly for influencers. The figures assembled by Grzegorz Tylec in his study in Roczniki Kulturoznawcze illustrate the gap between the registered and the obliged: 659 services appeared in the register at the end of 2024, whereas KRRiT itself estimated the number of creators subject to the duty at several thousand to over ten thousand. Every one of the latter, in the regulator’s view, ought to have filed. For a firm practising media law, that discrepancy is a reliable forecast of litigation.

The Statutory Test: Who Is a Provider of an On-Demand Service

Article 4(6a) of the Broadcasting Act defines an on-demand audiovisual media service as a media service provided in the course of an economic activity carried on to that end, consisting in the public provision of audiovisual programmes on the basis of a catalogue established by the entity providing the service. Read together with Article 4(1), the definition yields a cumulative test. There must be a media service for which the provider bears editorial responsibility and whose principal purpose, or the principal purpose of a dissociable section of which, is the provision of programmes to inform, entertain or educate; there must be an economic activity; the provision must be public and on demand; the content must consist of audiovisual programmes; the programmes must be arranged in a catalogue established by the provider; and Polish jurisdiction must attach under Article 1a, which turns on the provider’s establishment and the place where editorial decisions are taken, not on the language of the content or the location of the audience. KRRiT’s published questions and answers reduce this to three practical criteria: the creator conducts an economic activity, publicly makes available video that can be viewed at any time, and organises it into a catalogue, that is, a channel, a series of episodes or playlists.

Audience Size Is Irrelevant; the Character of the Activity Is Decisive

The regulator has been explicit that reach does not determine the duty. Exempt are creators who publish purely privately, as a hobby or irregularly; persons for whom video is merely ancillary to a principal activity; and persons conducting unregistered activity (działalność nierejestrowana) within the statutory thresholds. Since 1 January 2026 that threshold has been measured quarterly and amounts to PLN 10,813.50, so that a creator whose revenue from the activity exceeds roughly PLN 3,600 per month falls outside the exemption by definition; unregistered activity is, moreover, available only to a person who has not carried on an economic activity in the preceding sixty months. The doctrine goes further still: the absence of an entry in the business register changes nothing, because the existence of an economic activity is a question of fact rather than of registration. Whoever makes a video catalogue available in an organised, continuous and profit-oriented manner is a provider irrespective of self-description.

Advertisement or Programme: Peugeot Deutschland and the Boundary of the Media Service

The most serious argument against the registration duty originates in Luxembourg. In its judgment of 21 February 2018 in Case C-132/17 Peugeot Deutschland, the Court of Justice held that a car manufacturer’s YouTube channel containing only short promotional videos was not an audiovisual media service, since its principal purpose was promotion rather than information, entertainment or education. The Court did not need to decide whether such videos were programmes and left the question open, while accepting that a video may inform solely in order to promote. At the opposite pole stands the judgment of 21 October 2015 in Case C-347/14 New Media Online, in which the Court held that a section of short videos on a newspaper’s website may constitute a dissociable audiovisual media service provided that its content and function are autonomous from the journalistic activity, a matter for the national court, and that recordings of a few dozen seconds may qualify as programmes in their own right.

Nearly the entire influencer market lies between those two judgments. Elżbieta Czarny-Drożdżejko, writing in Roczniki Administracji i Prawa, captured the distinction in two images: an entrepreneur who posts on his own website recordings documenting completed work provides no media service, whereas a person who publishes videos and derives from them even modest advertising revenue, or is sponsored by a manufacturer, does. A channel on which a seller of products teaches its audience how to use them, and builds a following of its own on that teaching, is closer to the second image than to the first. Two circumstances move it there decisively. The first is monetisation: from the moment a platform pays for the content itself, the channel generates revenue independent of product sales and becomes a distinct source of income. The second is the entrepreneur’s own documentation. Where an appraiser has valued the brand and the channels as an asset, and a licence agreement attributes to them a value calculated on revenue, the proposition that, as against KRRiT, they are merely an adjunct to a shop would be internally inconsistent. The tax authority and the media regulator read the same papers.

Creator or Company: Identifying the Provider

Entry in the KRRiT register is declaratory rather than constitutive: it discloses the status of provider but does not create it. The provider is whoever exercises effective control over the selection of programmes and the manner of their arrangement in the catalogue, that is, whoever bears editorial responsibility within the meaning of Article 4(3) of the Act. In practice, creators build personal brands around their own names while conducting sales, advertising contracts and payroll through a limited liability company. Where the company commissions the content, lays down guidelines, holds the right to require amendment or removal of material and actually exercises those rights, the company is the provider and the creator remains a contractor. Were the provider instead a natural person, that person would personally bear the statutory obligations and penalties, would account for platform revenue as her own and would separate the brand’s operations from the company that licenses it; the register merely records that state of affairs. The licence of the trademark between creator and company has, moreover, a tax dimension of its own, examined in the context of trademark amortisation through licensing structures. For structures in which the brand operates through a company, that is the least favourable variant, because it separates liability from assets and revenue.

A company acting as provider must accept a measure of transparency. Article 47c of the Act requires the provider to make available on its website the names of its management board members, of shareholders holding more than 5 percent of the shares, of beneficial owners disclosed in the Central Register of Beneficial Owners, and a list of all media services it provides, including those provided by companies of the same capital group. Since 8 August 2025, a comparable though not identical set of information concerning owners exercising influence, beneficial owners and annual revenue from state advertising, including from public bodies of third countries, has been required by Article 6(1) of the European Media Freedom Act. The data on directors, shareholders and beneficial owners are already public in the commercial and beneficial-ownership registers; what is new is the duty to assemble them in one place and present them to the audience together with the list of services and the information on state advertising.

Transformation of a Sole Proprietorship and the Commencement Date

The notification form asks for the date on which the service began and requires a truthful answer. For creators who have moved from a sole proprietorship to a company, the answer depends on the mode of transition. On the transformation of an entrepreneur into a capital company under Article 551 § 5 of the Commercial Companies Code (Kodeks spółek handlowych), an alternative to company formation in Poland from scratch, the transformed company succeeds to all rights and obligations of the entrepreneur and the service continues without interruption, so that the notification states the date from which the entrepreneur made the catalogue available, while the date and mode of transformation are best explained in an annex to the filing. Where the enterprise was instead contributed in kind or sold, the provider until the date of the acquisition was the entrepreneur as a natural person and the company thereafter. The difference appears formal but bears on who answers for the period preceding registration.

Monetisation on Facebook, VAT and the Levy for the Polish Film Institute

Money from a platform sends the same signal to the regulator keeping the KRRiT register and to the tax authority. Under its current monetisation programme Meta rewards the performance of content rather than participation in particular advertisements, but for purposes of qualification the distinction is immaterial: under the standard terms for creators in the European Union, the revenue is consideration for a service rendered to Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, a point that must in each case be confirmed against the accepted programme terms and the payout documentation. For a Polish company this means a service subject to the reverse charge in Ireland, and hence registration for intra-Community VAT and reporting of the supplies in the recapitulative statement; the mechanics of VAT on transactions with platforms tend to surprise creators who have for years received payouts to a private account, and they are a recurring item in ongoing tax support for business. For the company, such receipts are ordinary business revenue subject to corporate income tax, not the creator’s personal income.

A second levy is less widely known. Article 19(6a) of the Cinematography Act (ustawa o kinematografii) obliges providers of on-demand services to contribute 1.5 percent of revenue from access fees or from the broadcasting of commercial communications, whichever is higher, to the Polish Film Institute. Micro-entrepreneurs within the meaning of the Entrepreneurs’ Law (Prawo przedsiębiorców) are exempt, as are providers whose services were used in the preceding year by no more than 1 percent of broadband subscribers. For most creators’ companies the exemption operates, but micro-entrepreneur status is tested annually on the data of the two preceding financial years, and the sale of goods does not enter the base. Meta’s programme, moreover, covers several formats, including photographs and text posts, so that only the portion of the remuneration attributable to programmes in the catalogue and the commercial communications accompanying them can enter the base at all. In borderline cases, the levy itself may be the subject of a request to the Institute for an individual interpretation under Article 34 of the Entrepreneurs’ Law, while the tax consequences of the same structure, in corporate income tax and VAT, may be secured through individual tax rulings.

The Obligations of a Provider Entered in the KRRiT Register

The obligations arise by operation of law from the moment the service meets the statutory definition, not from the entry; registration creates none of them. The first is identification: in a visible place on the profile, such as an “about” section, the provider must state the name of the service, its business name, registered address and contact details, and must identify KRRiT as the competent regulator and Poland as the jurisdiction. The second concerns commercial communications. Material in which the provider’s own product is promoted constitutes a commercial communication for purposes of self-promotion and must be recognisable as such, and any benefit from a third party connected with the promoted product, whether a fee, barter, discount or gift, lends the material an advertising character, as KRRiT’s guide puts it in simplified form. The 2022 recommendations of the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection differentiate the labels and distinguish a first unsolicited gift from an advertising collaboration, but the direction is the same: a clear label, in Polish, graphically distinguished, from the beginning of the material. Surreptitious commercial communications are prohibited.

The third obligation is the protection of minors: content that may impair their development may be provided only behind effective technical safeguards, and content that may adversely affect them must carry the graphic labels prescribed by KRRiT. The fourth, frequently overlooked, is the retention of copies of all published material for at least twenty-eight days after its removal, to be produced at the Chairman’s request. The fifth is the promotion of European works and their 30 percent share of the catalogue, from which micro-entrepreneurs are exempt and which a catalogue of a Polish creator’s own productions satisfies in any event, since the European origin of a programme is determined by its producer and authors under Article 15b, not by its language. The sixth is accessibility for persons with disabilities in 30 percent of programmes, by way of subtitles for the deaf, audio description or sign language. The KRRiT regulation of 17 May 2022 exempts catalogues used by no more than two million users in the preceding calendar year, but users are neither followers nor views; they must be counted for each catalogue separately according to a documented method, since the regulation does not prescribe how to deduplicate them, and catalogues in which at least half of the programmes are news and current affairs, sport, children’s or music programmes enjoy a reduced share of 5 percent. The seventh is the annual report due by 31 March on compliance, to which KRRiT appends a request for information on the revenue and costs of the service, sufficient according to the regulator’s current explanations in estimated form and without source documents; in 2024, however, it summoned providers to produce financial statements or tax returns under threat of penalty. Any change in the registered particulars must be notified within fourteen days.

Penalties for Failure to Register and the Limitation Period

Article 53c of the Act empowers the Chairman of KRRiT to impose on a provider that has failed to notify the KRRiT register a penalty of up to twenty times the average monthly wage in the enterprise sector for the quarter preceding the decision. According to the announcement of the President of the Central Statistical Office for the second quarter of 2026, that wage was PLN 9,396.33, yielding PLN 187,926.60; for decisions issued in the final quarter of the year the third-quarter index already governs. The same ceiling applies to breaches of the remaining obligations, from missing provider information to unlabelled advertising, and the penalty may be imposed anew thirty days after the deadline for payment of the previous one if the breach has not been remedied. In setting the amount, the authority has regard to the scope and gravity of the breach and to the provider’s previous conduct.

The practice is young but already legible. The first decisions were issued at the turn of 2023 and 2024: PLN 10,000 imposed on the operator of a YouTube channel and enforced in April 2024 through the tax office, and PLN 149,000 imposed in February 2024 on the organiser of a commercial pay-per-view broadcast subsequently made available on demand. The regulator has since imposed further penalties on natural persons whose identities it does not disclose. Failure to file the annual report attracts a separate penalty of up to PLN 1,000 on the person managing the provider, imposed only after an unheeded summons, and failure to provide information at the Chairman’s request a penalty of up to six months’ remuneration of that person. In a limited liability company that person is a member of the management board, which invites comparison with the general principles of board member liability.

A penalty decision may not be issued once two years have elapsed from the breach. A view has been advanced in the literature that the notification duty is breached once, upon expiry of the deadline, so that channels in operation for more than two years are no longer exposed. The authority may, however, maintain that failure to register is a breach continuing throughout the period in which the service is provided, and that reading appears the more probable, although no published ruling resolves the question. The limitation argument accordingly has defensive, not planning, value. An appeal against a penalty decision lies to the Regional Court in Warsaw, with a further appeal thereafter; the dispute is thus conducted before the ordinary courts rather than the administrative judiciary, unlike most disputes in administrative law.

The Filing: Form, Electronic Delivery and the True Commencement Date

The notification is made on the form published by KRRiT: the provider’s particulars, including tax and statistical identification numbers, a description of the service, the countries of reception and the commencement date. Since 1 January 2026 the primary electronic channel for correspondence with public authorities has been the e-Doręczenia system, alongside the traditional paper form; KRRiT’s page still mentions the older ePUAP platform, but after the end of the transitional period a general letter sent by that route offers no certainty that the filing has been effectively made. Several channels may be notified on a single form, but KRRiT assesses and enters each service separately, so that each requires its own commencement date. Where a channel is yet to pass to the company, for instance from an account hitherto operated privately by the creator, the notification states the planned date of takeover, at least fourteen days later, and the transfer is executed on that date. The Chairman enters the service by way of a ruling and refuses entry only where the provider was struck from the register in the preceding twelve months under Article 47ja, that is, for specified breaches of the protection of minors; an ordinary withdrawal from the register triggers no such bar.

The temptation to enter yesterday’s date on the form is understandable and unwise. Unreliable information supplied at the Chairman’s request is penalised in the person managing the provider, and a false date would surface at the first request for explanations, where an unreliable answer is separately sanctioned. A belated but voluntary entry in the KRRiT register does not extinguish liability for the earlier period, but it is a circumstance the authority weighs in setting the penalty, and the penalties so far imposed on online creators have been many times below the statutory maximum. The passage of time operates solely to the provider’s detriment.

What Registration Confers: Protection Against Platform Restrictions

The regulator argues that entry in the KRRiT register enhances credibility and affords an additional avenue of protection against unfounded blocking of content. Behind that claim lies a concrete mechanism: Article 18 of the European Media Freedom Act permits a media service provider to declare to a very large online platform that it is a provider, that it is editorially independent, that it meets the transparency requirements of Article 6 and that it bears editorial responsibility also for content generated with the use of artificial intelligence; the platform must then follow a special procedure before restricting the provider’s content on the basis of its own terms and conditions, subject to exceptions for illegal content, the protection of minors and the mitigation of systemic risks. This is procedural protection, not an exclusion of liability, as the case law on content creator liability for the dissemination of sanctioned material serves to remind. For a brand built on three platforms belonging to third parties, procedural protection nonetheless has real value.

Conclusion: Entry in the KRRiT Register Is the Easy Part

The notification form itself takes a quarter of an hour. What ought to precede it is harder: determining who in fact controls the catalogue; regularising the contract between creator and company; verifying micro-entrepreneur status and the number of users; and implementing the labelling regime, the archive and the identification section. Only then does entry in the KRRiT register describe a state of affairs that exists rather than one that everybody would prefer. None of this justifies deferring a notification that is already due; the ordering of the structure can proceed in parallel. Nor is the commencement date of the service the date of the first video; it is the day from which the channel satisfies the statutory criteria of regularity, profit orientation and a catalogue. Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec advises creators and their companies on the qualification of channels, the identification of the provider, entry in the KRRiT register and the implementation of the ensuing obligations, as well as on the tax consequences of structures in which the brand and trademark are licensed to the company, within its strategic advisory practice.