EU Court Issues Landmark Ruling on Limits of Online Copyright

EUROPE—In what is being called a landmark decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a ruling yesterday that reinforces the right of Europeans to "continue browsing the Web without fear of breaking copyright law," As reported by PCWorld.com.au. The underlying legal action upon which the ruling was made—which involved "U.K. newspaper publishers, a public relations association and a company that aggregates and redistributes news articles"—was never intended "to target individuals who browse the Web and read periodicals online, but, as the legal strategy was formulated, that ended up being the possible consequence." To get to the CJEU, of course, the case had to first make its way through various other courts, including the United Kingdom's Supreme Court, which ruled in April 2013 that European law expressly allows for unfettered "browsing and ... the making of temporary copies in the end-user’s cache and screen." The Court added in its ruling, "Making mere viewing, rather than downloading or printing the material an infringement could make infringers of millions of ordinary Internet users across the EU," while also noting that "it has never been an infringement of EU or English law to view or read an infringing article in physical form." While the UE Supremes ruling was authoritative, that court still referred the matter to the CJEU, which as the European Union's top court, would definitively decide the matter. As PCWorld put it, "The EU's top court found that the copies that are inherently made when people browse the Internet do not violate copyright law, and that people do not need permission from a copyright holder to view Web content. The EU law must be interpreted as meaning that the copies on the user's computer screen and the copies in the 'cache' of that computer's hard disk are covered by the exception for temporary acts of reproduction of the EU Copyright Directive, the court ruled." Though seemingly a commonsense ruling, vested interests in the EU still characterize it as "a crucial judgment," which was the reaction of Jakob Kucharczyk, Brussels director of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, who added, "Any other ruling would essentially mess up the Internet for European citizens. "Despite the ruling," he continued, "one cannot overstate how irrational this case was to begin with. It's hard to believe the question at stake was whether browsing the Internet is legal or not. This was not the first copyright case challenging the foundations of Internet use, and policymakers will have to ensure that copyright rules will not continue to threaten the growth in the Internet economy." The June 5 CJEU ruling can be read here in its entirety.