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# Lesson 2: Who Carries Which Duty

> Academy Foundations Module 2 Lesson 2: how legal responsibility for a Digital Product Passport is allocated between manufacturers, importers, distributors and authorised representatives, and why participation is not the same as accountability.

**Module 2, Lesson 2 of 4. About 8 minutes.**

## Orientation

Lesson 1 placed your organisation on a map of contribution. This lesson answers the sharper
question that follows: if something is wrong, who is actually on the hook. That is not the same
question, and conflating them is how the wrong person ends up carrying risk they never agreed to,
or the right person assumes someone else has it covered.

This matters most in the moment a passport is found to be missing, wrong or unreachable. Whoever an
authority looks to first is decided by role, not by who happened to build the system or hold the
spreadsheet.

Any two of: brand owners, manufacturers, component and material suppliers, importers and
distributors, retailers, service repair and recycling organisations.

## Learning Objectives

## Four Roles, Four Different Duties

Legal responsibility for a passport obligation is allocated by the applicable legislation to a
defined economic operator, a legally recognised role such as manufacturer, importer or distributor.
It is not allocated to whoever holds the data, whoever built the resolver, or whoever happens to
have the most complete spreadsheet. That separation is worth holding onto deliberately, because
contribution, contract terms and internal ownership all describe something real, but none of them
rewrite who the law looks to.

Four roles carry the bulk of potential legal accountability, and each carries something distinct.
The **manufacturer** commonly carries the widest set of obligations, because it is closest to the
product's design and construction, though the exact set depends on the specific measure that
applies. The **importer** carries its own distinct duties when placing a product made outside the
EU onto the EU market: it does not inherit the manufacturer's obligations wholesale, and it does not
replace them either, it holds a separate set triggered by the act of importing. The **distributor**
carries due care duties when making a product available, which is a narrower standard than creating
a passport from scratch. The **authorised representative** acts only under a written mandate and
only for obligations that the applicable legislation permits to be delegated; it cannot invent
authority the legislation does not grant it.

Two further groups matter without being at the centre. Online marketplaces and fulfilment service
providers pick up specific duties only where a particular piece of relevant legislation defines
them into scope, not automatically by virtue of hosting a listing or a warehouse. Suppliers,
laboratories and technology providers sit further out again: they can carry real contractual and
service responsibility, and a failure on their part can be commercially serious, but that is
different from being the statutorily responsible operator for the finished product.

**The common misreading** is to treat "we signed a contract that puts this on our supplier" as
equivalent to "our supplier now carries the legal duty". A contract allocates cost, remedy and blame
between the parties who signed it. It does not touch what the law says about who an authority may
act against. An organisation can be contractually protected and still legally responsible at the
same time, for the same failure.

#### [Who Is Legally Responsible for a Digital Product Passport?](/docs/knowledge-base/regulations/who-is-legally-responsible-for-a-digital-product-passport)

Read the four role sections in sequence and note, for each, what triggers the duty and what the
duty actually requires. The distinctions are precise and worth reading exactly as written rather
than summarised.

#### The Aurelia S2 across four roles

The contract manufacturer in Vietnam builds the trimmer and holds the bill of materials, but has no
direct EU obligation in most structures of this kind. The brand owner's Dutch entity imports the
finished product into the EU and is very likely the party carrying the passport obligation for
this product, because the duty on placing a third-country product on the Union market usually lands
on the importer. A retailer distributing the S2 carries due care duties, such as not obscuring the
data carrier and verifying that a passport exists, but is not expected to create one. If the brand
used an authorised representative in a market where it has no local presence, that representative
would carry only the specific obligations named in its written mandate, and nothing beyond it.

Nobody in that chain should assume the contract manufacturer is "handling compliance" simply because
it holds the most detailed technical data.

#### Separate participation from accountability in your own chain

For one product you mapped in Lesson 1, write down which organisation you believe carries the
legal duty, and separately, which organisation you have a contract with to supply or verify the
underlying data. If those two names are different, write one sentence on what happens if the
contracted party gets it wrong: who does the authority approach first, and what does your contract
actually recover for you.

## Knowledge Check

## Takeaways

* Legal responsibility follows the operator role defined by the applicable legislation, not who
  holds the data or built the system.
* Manufacturers, importers, distributors and authorised representatives each carry a distinct set of
  duties, not a shared or interchangeable one.
* Contractual protection and legal responsibility are different things and can both apply to the
  same party at once.
* Marketplaces, fulfilment providers, suppliers and technology providers typically carry
  contractual, operational or service responsibility rather than statutory product responsibility.

**If you remember one thing:** a contract can move cost after a failure, it cannot move who the law
was looking at when the failure happened.

## Sources

This lesson draws on
[Who Is Legally Responsible for a Digital Product Passport?](/docs/knowledge-base/regulations/who-is-legally-responsible-for-a-digital-product-passport),
sections Manufacturer Responsibilities, Importer Responsibilities, Distributor Responsibilities and
Authorised Representatives.

## Related Docs

* [Lesson 3: Reading Scope Without Guessing](/docs/academy/foundations/module-2/lesson-3)
* [Lesson 1: Where You Sit in the Value Chain](/docs/academy/foundations/module-2/lesson-1)
* [Who Is Legally Responsible for a Digital Product Passport?](/docs/knowledge-base/regulations/who-is-legally-responsible-for-a-digital-product-passport)
* [Module 2 overview](/docs/academy/foundations/module-2)