Belgium's French Community makes streaming services that target its audience invest in audiovisual production, and it decides what counts: new works, with a quota for Belgian French-language ones, and no credit for buying rights to films already made. Netflix — established in the Netherlands, already paying there — asks the Constitutional Court, and now the Court of Justice, how much of that the Audiovisual Media Services Directive allows.
By judgment of 25 January 2018 (ECLI:EU:C:2018:37) the Court held that Mr Schrems had not lost his consumer status for his own Facebook account through his books, lectures and campaigning, so he could sue Facebook in Vienna.
By Grand Chamber judgment of 17 October 2017 (ECLI:EU:C:2017:766) the Court held that a legal person claiming injury from online publications may sue for its entire damage where it has its centre of interests, and that claims for rectification and removal…
By judgment of 30 March 2017 (ECLI:EU:C:2017:243) the Court held that a printed advertisement for products sold through an online platform may, within the limits imposed by the medium, refer consumers to the website for part of the mandatory information —…
On 5 June 2018 the Grand Chamber ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2018:388) that the administrator of a Facebook fan page is a joint controller, together with Facebook, of the processing of visitors' data through the Insights statistics — and that the German supervisory…
On 14 June 2017 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2017:456) that the operators of The Pirate Bay themselves make a communication to the public by indexing and managing torrents of protected works, despite the content sitting on users' machines.
By order of 8 September 2016 (ECLI:EU:C:2016:672) the Court declared the reference from the Regional Administrative Court for Lazio manifestly inadmissible for failure to set out the factual and legal context with the precision Article 94 of the Rules of…
By judgment of 25 January 2017 (ECLI:EU:C:2017:36) the Court held that Article 13 of the Enforcement Directive does not preclude national legislation allowing a copyright holder to claim, without proving actual loss, a lump sum of twice the hypothetical…
On 1 March 2017 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2017:144) that Article 9 of the InfoSoc Directive — provisions concerning "access to cable of broadcasting services" — does not cover national legislation permitting the immediate retransmission by cable,…
On 10 November 2016 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2016:856) that the public-lending exception can cover the lending of e-books on the one-copy-one-user model, digital lending being within the Rental and Lending Directive.
By judgment of 22 September 2016 (ECLI:EU:C:2016:717) the Court ruled, in the words of the operative part: “EU law, in particular Article 5(2)(b) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of…
On 17 March 2016 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2016:173) that a rightholder claiming damages on the hypothetical-royalty basis of Article 13(1)(b) of the Enforcement Directive may additionally claim compensation for moral prejudice — the licence-fee measure…
On 8 September 2016 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2016:644) that posting a hyperlink to works published online without the rightholder's consent is a communication to the public where the poster knew or ought to have known of the illegality.
On 15 September 2016 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2016:689) that a shopkeeper offering free open Wi-Fi provides a "mere conduit" service and cannot be held liable in damages for users' infringements.
By judgment of 17 February 2016 (ECLI:EU:C:2016:89) the Court held that a split screen separating closing credits from the following advertising break need not additionally carry an acoustic or optical signal, provided the separation itself meets Article…
One quirk of Spanish labour law is that where a state body abusively employs someone on a temporary contract without fully complying with the law, Spanish case law will deem that person to be working on the basis of ‘a non-permanent contract of indefinite duration’. The problem is that some…
By reasoned order of 21 October 2014 (ECLI:EU:C:2014:2315) the Court applied Svensson to framing: embedding a work already freely available online with the rightholder's consent is not a communication to a new public and needs no fresh authorisation,…
By judgment of 11 September 2014 (ECLI:EU:C:2014:2209) the Court held that the E-Commerce Directive covers an online newspaper remunerated by advertising, but that a publisher which knows of and controls the information it posts is not a "mere conduit",…
On 26 March 2015 the Court ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2015:199) that Article 3(2) of the InfoSoc Directive does not preclude Member States from extending broadcasters' related rights to communications to the public such as live internet transmissions of sporting…
On 3 September 2014 the Grand Chamber ruled (ECLI:EU:C:2014:2132) that parody is an autonomous concept of EU law with only two essential characteristics: it evokes an existing work while being noticeably different from it, and it constitutes an expression…
By judgment of 19 June 2014 (ECLI:EU:C:2014:2004) the Court held that the in-house (Teckal) exception fails where the awardee, though performing public-interest tasks, counts private charitable interests among its members: the contracting authority then…
By judgment of 8 May 2014 (ECLI:EU:C:2014:303) the Court refused to extend the in-house exception to "horizontal" awards: a contract between Hamburg University and HIS — both controlled to differing degrees by the city — required tendering, because the…
Does the EU’s Authorisation Directive 2002/20 mean that Vodafone Omnitel, Sky and other companies can avoid paying millions of euro to the Italian regulatory body, AgCom? Facts The Italian telecoms and broadcasting sector has a regulatory body known as AgCom (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle…
By judgment of 18 July 2013 (ECLI:EU:C:2013:496) the Court ruled, in the words of the operative part: “Article 4(1) of Directive 2010/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 March 2010 on the coordination of certain provisions laid down…