Copyright: Europe Explores Its Boundaries Part 3: 'Meltwater' – EU Rules That Browsing Does Not Need A Licence – A Victory For Common Sense (Or For Pirates)?

On 5 June 2014 the European Court of Justice (CJEU) published its decision in the "Meltwater" Case C-360/13, (Public Relations Consultations Association Ltd (PRCA) v Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd (NLA) and Others). In a ruling that some have hailed as a victory for common sense, the CJEU declared that browsing freely accessible copyrighted material on the Internet does not constitute a copyright infringement, and on-screen and cached copies will constitute temporary copies for the purposes of Article 5(1) of the InfoSoc Directive ( EC Directive 2001/29 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society ("InfoSoc Directive") was introduced in 2001 to meet the challenge of the Internet, e-commerce, and digital technology).

Background

The case concerns the PRCA, which is an association of public relations professionals, and the NLA, which is a body set up by UK newspaper publishers for the purpose of collective licensing of newspaper content. The PRCA's members use a media monitoring service offered by Meltwater which involves Meltwater sending emails to users containing headlines of articles which are then linked to the rights holder's website. Users can also access search results on Meltwater's website. (It should be noted that if a website has a paywall, the user will have to pay for access to the material on the same terms as everyone else – the link does not enable the user to avoid the paywall.)

The NLA argued that Meltwater's customers needed various licences to access the rights holder's material, including: (i) a licence to use the temporary on-screen and cached copies of search results created when the user viewed search results on Meltwater's website and (ii) a licence to use the temporary on-screen and cached copies of an article created when the user clicked on a link and viewed an article on the rights holder's website. The PRCA claimed that these temporary copies fell within the copyright exemption detailed in Article 5(1) (as transposed into UK law by Section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988).

Article 5(1) provides an exemption from copyright infringement based on the following cumulative conditions where:

Copying is temporary. Copying is transient or incidental. Copying is an integral and essential part of a technological process (i.e., (1) the acts of reproduction are carried out entirely in the context of the implementation of a technological process and (2)...