Infopaq International A/S v Danske Dagblades Forening [2009] ECJ 17

• Defendant 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 whether these actions constituted ‘reproduction’ as per Infosoc Directive 2001 Article 2(a).

Held

• Protection against reproduction in Article 2(a) must be given broad meaning.

• Thus for purposes of Article 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’

  • 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.

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