Assessing the impact and reception of the Court of Justice of the European Union case law on UK copyright law: what does the future hold?

Very soon it will be a quarter of a century since the first EU directive in the field of copyright was adopted. The case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“the CJEU” or “the Court”) on copyright is now pervasive; there is no aspect of copyright it has not ruled on. Since its landmark judgment in Infopaq in 2009 , many of its decisions in the field of copyright have generated controversy mainly because of the Court’s activism or ‘harmonisation bug’. The Court has often filled gaps in the acquis communautaire where the silence of the texts could have meant that the competence still belonged to Member States