Judgment — ECLI:EU:C:2014:1195
Date: 2014-06-05
Language of the case: English
Court formation: Fourth Chamber
Subject matter: Intellectual, industrial and commercial property;Approximation of laws;Copyright and related rights
Procedure: Reference for a preliminary ruling
Origin: United Kingdom

Summary — Judgment of the Court (Fourth Chamber), 5 June 2014 Approximation of laws — Copyright and related rights — Directive 2001/29 — Harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society —Reproduction right — Exceptions and limitations — Creation of copies on-screen and in the cache of the hard disk of a computer in the course of viewing a website — Included (European Parliament and Council Directive 2001/29, Arts 3(1) and 5) Article 5 of Directive 2001/29 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society must be interpreted as meaning that the copies on the user’s computer screen and the copies in the internet cache of that computer’s hard disk, made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website, satisfy the conditions that those copies must be temporary, that they must be transient or incidental in nature and that they must constitute an integral and essential part of a technological process, as well as the conditions laid down in Article 5(5) of that directive, and that they may therefore be made without the authorisation of the copyright holders. Since the on-screen copies and the cached copies are created only for the purpose of viewing websites, they constitute, on that basis, a special case within the meaning of Article 5(5) of Directive 2001/29. In that context, the legitimate interests of the copyright holders concerned are properly safeguarded, for the works are made available to internet users by the publishers of the websites, those publishers being required, under Article 3(1) of the directive, to obtain authorisation from those rights holders, since that making available constitutes a communication to the public within the meaning of that article. (see paras 55, 57, 58, 63, operative part)