Law note · European Union
Infopaq International A/S v Danske Dagblades Forening
cite Case C-5/08, judgment of 16 July 2009
stage IN FORCE in force since 2009-07-16
The CJEU (Fourth Chamber) held that an 11-word extract from a newspaper article can be protected by copyright under Art. 2 of the InfoSoc Directive if it reflects the author's own intellectual creation, the standard that now governs all snippet reproduction across EU member states. The Court also found that Infopaq's media-monitoring data-capture process did not qualify for the transient-copy exemption (Art. 5(1)) because the printing step was not transient. This ruling is the foundational EU authority on the copyright status of news snippets used by aggregators.
Primary source: EUR-Lex / CURIA