NLA v Meltwater: temporary copies issue referred to the CJEU

Readers will remember that both the High Court and the Court of Appeal held, in NLA v Meltwater, that users of Meltwater's news aggregation service need a licence from the NLA in order to receive and read Meltwater news snippets. The specific question of whether the copies made on users' computer screens and hard drives when they access and read content online are temporary for the purposes of Article 5.1 of the InfoSoc Directive was appealed to the Supreme Court.

There has been some heated discussion on this blog as to whether the case would or would not break the internet, and several academics locked horns to debate whether the case meant the end of browsing. This is a topic on which everyone has an opinion, because the question of whether it is legal to read material online is an important one. So important that the Supreme Court has today held that it will refer the question of temporary copies to the CJEU.

The Supreme Court's decision contains a thorough analysis of the temporary copies exception and previous CJEU case law, and sets out the conclusions that it reaches on the effect of the Information Society Directive as the CJEU has interpreted and applied it to date.

The decision notes that if it is an infringement merely to view copyright material, without downloading or printing out, then those who browse the internet are likely unintentionally to incur civil liability, at least in principle, by merely coming upon a web-page containing copyright material in the course of browsing.

The Supreme Court recognises that "the issue has a transnational dimension and that the application of copyright law to internet use has important implications for many millions of people across the EU making use of what has become a basic technical facility. These considerations make it desirable that any decision on the point should be referred to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling, so that the critical point may be resolved in a manner which will apply uniformly across the European Union."

On that basis the Supreme Court will refer to the CJEU the question whether the requirements of article 5.1 of the Information Society Directive that acts of reproduction should be (i) temporary, (ii) transient or incidental and (iii) an integral and essential part of the technological process, are satisfied by the technical features described at paragraphs 2 and 31-32 of the Supreme Court judgment, having regard in particular to the fact that a copy of protected material may in the ordinary course of internet usage remain in the cache for a period of time after the browsing session which has generated that copy is completed until it is overlaid by other material, and a screen copy will remain on screen until the browsing session is terminated by the user.

The specific questions to be referred are yet to be decided.

 

Disclaimer: Baker & McKenzie acts for Meltwater and PRCA in this case.