Judgment;Summary — ECLI:EU:C:2021:434
Date: 2021-06-03
Language of the case: Latvian
Court formation: Fifth Chamber
Subject matter: Right of establishment;Intellectual, industrial and commercial property;Approximation of laws;Freedom to provide services
Procedure: Reference for a preliminary ruling
Origin: Latvia

Translation C-762/19 - 1 
Case C-762/19 
Request for a preliminary ruling 
Date lodged: 
17 October 2019 
Referring court:  
Rīgas apgabaltiesas Civillietu tiesu kolēģija (Regional Court, Riga 
(Civil Law Division)) (Latvia) 
Date of the decision to refer: 
14 October 2019 
Applicant at first instance and respondent:  
SIA ‘CV-Online Latvia’  
Defendant at first instance and appellant: 
SIA ‘Melons’ 
   
[...] 
ECLI:LV:RAT:2019:1014.C30638718.8.L 
ORDER 
concerning the staying of proceedings and a request to the Court of Justice of the 
European Union for a preliminary ruling 
The Rīgas apgabaltiesas Civillietu tiesas kolēģija (Regional Court, Riga (Civil 
Law Division)) [...] [composition of the Chamber and parties’ representatives] 
in open court on 14 October 2019 heard the civil proceedings concerning the 
application brought by SIA ‘CV-Online Latvia’ against SIA ‘Melons’, in which 
the applicant sought a prohibition on the inclusion of links on the website 
managed by the defendant whereby users can click on the links in order to access 
the applicant’s database. 
Background to the proceedings  
Facts 
EN 
REQUEST FOR A PRELIMINARY RULING OF 14.10.2019 — CASE C-762/19 
 
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1. The applicant and respondent, SIA ‘CV-Online Latvia’ (‘the applicant’), owns and 
manages the website www.cv.lv, which enables people to search for jobs offered 
and sought. In the main proceedings, it is not disputed that the applicant’s website, 
together with the jobs offered and sought on it, should be classed as a database. 
The defendant and appellant, SIA ‘Melons’ (‘the defendant’), owns and manages 
the website www.kurdarbs.lv, which is a search engine. 
The website managed by the defendant finds websites that publish information 
accessible to the public on job advertisements and uses a hyperlink to redirect 
users searching for job advertisements to the website on which the information it 
has found was originally published. End users click on the hyperlinks to access the 
applicant’s website, www.cv.lv, and its contents, from the aforesaid website. 
At the appeal stage, the applicant’s representative accepted the position of the 
defendant’s representative, who maintained that the defendant does not perform 
an online transmission to the applicant’s website but instead uses another form of 
transmission.  
According to the main proceedings, the applicant published meta tags 
(Schema.org microdata) on its website, www.cv.lv, which appear in the results 
obtained by search engines. 
In line with the Schema.org microdata standards, the meta tags on the applicant’s 
website provide the following information: hyperlink, job, employer, geographical 
location of the job and date. That information, which is contained in the meta tags, 
is shown in the results offered by the search engine on the defendant’s website. 
2. The applicant filed an application to protect its sui generis rights, in order to 
prevent extraction and re-utilisation of the contents of its database. According to 
the applicant, through the activities described above, the defendant is extracting a 
substantial part of the database and transmitting it to its website. Also, through the 
hyperlinks, the defendant is ensuring re-utilisation of the database. 
3. The court of first instance ruled that there was an infringement of a sui generis 
right and concluded that the fact that a hyperlink is included in the search results 
once the end user completes the search fields and that, by clicking on that 
hyperlink, the user is ‘taken’ to the applicant’s website constitutes re-utilisation of 
the database. 
4. The defendant lodged an appeal against the judgment handed down by the court of 
first instance, arguing that the website it manages does not provide online 
transmissions, that is to say, it does not operate ‘in real time’. The inclusion of a 
hyperlink on a website does not entail a system of direct control, does not operate 
‘in real time’ and does not provide online transmission or any other form of 
transmission. 
CV-ONLINE LATVIA 
 
3 
According to the defendant, a distinction must be drawn between a website and a 
database, because the applicant has placed all the information that it wishes to 
make available to search engines outside its database, that is, on its website, 
www.cv.lv, with the result that search engines do not access the applicant’s 
database. 
The defendant notes that the Schema.org microdata standards have been drawn up 
and maintained by the top four world leading internet search engines ― Google, 
Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex ― but that they are followed by virtually all the search 
engines in the world, including its own search engine, which is available at 
www.kurdarbs.lv. In accordance with those standards, the applicant has published 
on its website, www.cv.lv, the information (meta tags) that it wants search engines 
(such as google.com, bing.com, yahoo.com and, among others, kurdarbs.lv) to 
supply in the search results. The meta tags are located on the website www.cv.lv, 
which is outside the database. 
In the view of the defendant, the conclusions drawn from the judgments of the 
Court of Justice of the European Union in The British Horseracing Board Ltd and 
Others (‘Case C-203/02’) and in Innoweb (‘Case C-202/12’) are not relevant to 
the present case, in so far as the facts of the main proceedings are different, and 
this is grounds for adopting a different interpretation of the terms ‘extraction’ and 
‘re-utilisation’.  
Points of Law  
Legal framework 
5. Article 7 of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council of 
11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, which addresses the object of 
protection and forms part of Chapter III, entitled ‘Sui generis right’, stipulates that 
Member States shall provide for a right for the maker of a database which shows 
that there has been qualitatively and/or quantitatively a substantial investment in 
either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents to prevent 
extraction and/or re-utilisation of the whole or of a substantial part, evaluated 
qualitatively and/or quantitatively, of the contents of that database. 
This provision defines the terms ‘extraction’ and ‘re-utilisation’ as follows: 
(a) ‘extraction’ shall mean the permanent or temporary transfer of all or a 
substantial part of the contents of a database to another medium by any means or 
in any form; 
(b) ‘re-utilisation’ shall mean any form of making available to the public all or a 
substantial part of the contents of a database by the distribution of copies, by 
renting, by online or other forms of transmission. The first sale of a copy of a 
database within the Community by the rightholder or with his consent shall 
exhaust the right to control resale of that copy within the Community. 
REQUEST FOR A PRELIMINARY RULING OF 14.10.2019 — CASE C-762/19 
 
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6. Directive 96/9 was transposed into Latvian law on 1 May 2004 by amending the 
Autortiesību likums (Law on copyright).  
Article 57(1) and (2) of the Law on copyright provides that the maker of a 
database, in respect of which there has been qualitatively and/or quantitatively a 
substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the 
contents (Article 5(2)) shall mean the natural or legal person who has taken the 
initiative of creating the database and assumed the risk of the investment. 
The maker of a database shall have the right to prevent the following activities in 
respect of the whole or of a substantial part, evaluated qualitatively and/or 
qualitatively, of the contents of that database: 
(1) extraction: the permanent or temporary transfer of all or a substantial 
part of the contents of a database to another medium by any means or in any 
form; 
(2) re-utilisation: any form of making available to the public all or a 
substantial part of the contents of a database, including by the distribution of 
copies, by renting, by online or other forms of transmission. 
Reasons why there are doubts over the interpretation of the EU legislation 
7. In the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in case C-202/12, it 
was held that [‘]Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and 
of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases must be 
interpreted as meaning that an operator who makes available on the internet a 
dedicated meta search engine such as that at issue in the main proceedings re-
utilises the whole or a substantial part of the contents of a database protected 
under Article 7, where that dedicated meta engine: 
– provides the end user with a search form which essentially offers the same 
range of functionality as the search form on the database site; 
– “translates” queries from end users into the search engine for the database site 
“in real time”, so that all the information on that database is searched through; 
and 
– presents the results to the end user using the format of its website, grouping 
duplications together into a single block item but in an order that reflects 
criteria comparable to those used by the search engine of the database site 
concerned for presenting results.[’] 
8. Paragraph 25 of the judgment states that [‘]it can be seen from the order for 
reference that a dedicated meta search engine such as that at issue in the main 
proceedings does not have its own search engine scanning other websites. Instead, 
in order to answer queries, the meta search engine makes use of the search engines 
on the websites covered by its service, as described in paragraph 9 above. The 
CV-ONLINE LATVIA 
 
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dedicated meta search engine enters its users’ queries, in translated form, in those 
search engines “in real time”, so that all the data on those databases is searched 
through.’ 
In the main proceedings, the defendant argues that the website it manages, 
www.kurdarbs.lv, does not translate database search queries ‘in real time’ and that 
it has its own meta search engine. 
9. Paragraphs 39 and 40 of the judgment state that [‘]as regards the activity of the 
operator of a dedicated meta search engine such as that at issue in the main 
proceedings and, in particular, the facet of that activity that is of relevance to the 
present case ― that is to say, making available on the internet a dedicated meta 
search engine for translating queries (keyed into that meta search engine by end 
users) into the search engines of the databases covered by the service of the meta 
search engine in question ― it should be noted that that activity is not limited to 
indicating to the user databases providing information on a particular subject[’]. 
[‘]The purpose of that activity is to provide any end user with a means of 
searching all the data in a protected database and, accordingly, to provide access 
to the entire contents of that database by a means other than that intended by the 
maker of that database, whilst using the database’s search engine and offering the 
same advantages as the database itself in terms of searches, as can be seen from 
paragraphs 25 and 26 above. The end user no longer has any need, when 
researching data, to go to the website of the database concerned, or to its 
homepage, or its search form, in order to consult that database, since he can 
consult the contents of that website “in real time” through the website of the 
dedicated meta search engine.[’] 
In paragraph 1 of this order, the referring court notes that the website managed by 
the defendant finds websites that publish information accessible to the public on 
job advertisements and uses a hyperlink to redirect users searching for job 
advertisements to the website on which the information it has found was originally 
published. End users click on the hyperlinks to access the applicant’s website, 
www.cv.lv, and its contents, from the aforesaid website. 
Given that the facts of the main proceedings are different, the referring court has 
doubts over whether the conclusions reached by the Court of Justice of the 
European Union in case C-202/12 on the extraction or re-utilisation of the 
contents of a database by other forms of transmission are relevant as regards 
hyperlinks, which is an issue that is closely related to the difficulties of 
interpretation concerning the re-utilisation of a database by other forms of 
transmission. 
10. In paragraph 4 of this order, the referring court sets out the observations of the 
defendant, who argues that a distinction must be drawn between a website and a 
database, because the applicant has placed all the information that it wishes to 
make available to search engines outside its database, that is, on its website, 
REQUEST FOR A PRELIMINARY RULING OF 14.10.2019 — CASE C-762/19 
 
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www.cv.lv, in the form of meta data, with the result that search engines do not 
access the applicant’s database.  
11. According to the directive, ‘extraction’ means the permanent or temporary 
transfer of all or a substantial part of the contents of a database to another medium 
by any means or in any form. Consequently, as regards the concept of the 
‘extraction’ of the contents of a database, the difficulty of interpretation lies in 
distinguishing between meta tags, being the information created by the applicant 
in order to enable internet search engines to extract that information, and the 
contents of the database. The question, therefore, is whether the information 
contained in the meta tags that is shown in the defendant’s search engine 
constitutes an extraction of all or a substantial part of the contents of a database to 
another medium in any form, within the meaning of the directive under 
consideration. 
12. In the view of the referring court, the acte clair doctrine is not applicable, because 
the facts of the main proceedings are different from those addressed in the 
judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in case C-202/12. The 
differences are explained in paragraphs 7 to 12 of this order. 
13. In the light of the considerations set out above, the referring court has doubts over 
the interpretation of Article 7, in Chapter III (Sui generis right) of the Directive of 
the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal 
protection of databases. Therefore, in the opinion of the referring court, questions 
need to be referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary 
ruling. 
[...] [reference to national rules of procedure] 
Operative part  
Based on Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, [...] 
[reference to national rules of procedure] the Regional Court, Riga (Civil Law 
Division) 
orders 
That the following questions be referred to the Court of Justice of the European 
Union for a preliminary ruling: 
1. Should the defendant’s activities, which consist in using a hyperlink to 
redirect end users to the applicant’s website, where they can consult a 
database of job advertisements, be interpreted as falling within the definition 
of ‘re-utilisation’ in Article 7(2)(b) of the Directive of 11 March 1996 on the 
legal protection of databases, more specifically, as the re-utilisation of the 
database by another form of transmission? 
CV-ONLINE LATVIA 
 
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2. Should the information containing the meta tags that is shown in the 
defendant’s search engine be interpreted as falling within the definition of 
‘extraction’ in Article 7(2)(a) of the Directive of 11 March 1996 on the legal 
protection of databases, more specifically, as the permanent or temporary 
transfer of all or a substantial part of the contents of a database to another 
medium by any means or in any form? 
That proceedings be stayed until the Court of Justice of the European Union issues 
a final judgment. 
[...] [reference to national rules of procedure] 
[...][Signatures]