The Concept of Damage under the 2024/2853 Product Liability Directive – A Comparison with Turkish Law

Abstract

This article examines the concept of ‘damage’ under the EU Product Liability Directive (EU) 2024/2853 and offers a comparative assessment against both the 1985 Directive 85/374/EEC and Turkish law. The new Directive responds to technological and market transformations by extending the product liability framework to digital realities, notably by encompassing software and data within the notion of ‘product’ and by recalibrating compensable heads of damage. Focusing on art 6 of Directive 2024/2853, the article analyses four core categories of recoverable harm: (i) death and personal injury, expressly including medically recognised psychological health impairments; (ii) property damage, subject to specific limitations; (iii) destruction or corruption of data, now treated as a compensable interest analogous to property; and (iv) non-material loss insofar as it is compensable under national law. It further clarifies the Directive’s deliberate exclusions – such as pure economic loss, privacy violations and discrimination as standalone triggers of strict liability – and the continued boundary between tort-based product liability and contractual remedies, particularly through the exclusion of damage to the defective product itself. The Turkish experience provides a revealing external lens. While Turkey’s Product Safety and Technical Regulations Code refers broadly to the Turkish Code of Obligations for the assessment of compensation, it lacks the Directive’s definitional clarity and contains structural ambiguities stemming from a fragmented transposition approach. By mapping points of alignment and divergence, the article highlights interpretive tensions – especially concerning digital harms and the classification of data – and develops reform-oriented insights for Turkish product liability law in light of the EU acquis. © 2026 Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved.