The Court of Justice Copyright Case Law: Quo Vadis?

Almost a quarter of a century after the adoption of the first EU directive in the field of copyright , 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. The Court has intervened more recently because of three factors: more acquis (directives), more references and lacunae in the acquis which give the Court an interpretation space. Since its landmark judgment in Infopaq in 2009 , 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. It has thus changed United Kingdom (“UK”) copyright law, sometimes rather deeply and often unexpectedly. This, among other things, has prompted much criticism against the Court’s case law especially on this side of the Channel. Less work has yet been done to try and predict the Court’s case law future direction. The flurry of CJEU copyright decisions now allows such analysis