D ran media analysis business. This involved “scraping” of newspaper articles, whereby employees would scan newspapers and other periodicals into computer; computer would then convert articles into text formats, and scan them for the occurrence of a particular word indicated by customers. At end of process, a cover sheet would be printed out showing a summary of all of the occurrences of that word in the publications. Issue was whetherthese actions constituted ‘reproduction’ as per Infosoc Directive 2001Article 2(a). Held:
· Protection against reproduction in Article 2(a) must be given broad meaning.
· Thus for purposes of Art 2(a), copyright applies in relation to subject matter that is original in sense that it is author’s own intellectual creation.
· Words alone do not constitute a ‘work’
Ø is only through choice, sequence and combination of those words that author achieves result that is an intellectual creation.
· However given that protection is ‘broad’, isolated sentences or even parts of sentences may constitute an intellectual creation.
· Storing an 11 word extract of a longer work constitutes ‘reproduction’ if the elements reproduced can be classified as an intellectual creation.
