LUXEMBOURG: Publishers stopped from copying

A German professor has won a precedent-setting case to prevent European Union publishers from using university-collated compendiums of out-of-copyright materials to produce their own commercial collections of works. A ruling from the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said publishers could be blocked from selling these books, if they "transfer a substantial part" of the original source to their own publication.

The court said that if undertaken in the European Union, this would break the EU database directive even if the material was not electronically copied from the source. The precedent-setting judgement came in a case involving the University of Freiburg, which had spent EUR34,900 (US$45,000) on assembling a list of the 1,100 most important poems in German literature between 1730 and 1900.

German publisher Directmedia later produced a CD-ROM called 1,000 poems everyone should have which included 876 poems written between 1720 and 1900, of which 856 were on the Freiburg list.

The university's Professor Ulrich Knoop took legal action against Directmedia, claiming his anthology had been illegally copied by a commercial publisher. The case was referred to the ECJ which had to decide whether the publisher had broken the EU database directive granting rights to database producers. The judges ruled there had been a breach of this legislation and said when there was a "permanent or temporary transfer of all or a substantial part of [database] contents to another medium...such an act of consultation may be subject to authorisation by the maker".

They added that such "extraction which the maker of a protected database may prevent" was "not dependent on the nature and form of the mode of operation used". This is important because in this case, Directmedia only used Knoop's list as a source (even ignoring some of his chosen poems), and "took the actual texts of each poem from its own digital resources".

The publisher could have used the database for information purposes but not relied so heavily upon it, said the court. The ECJ is Europe's most senior judicial body and its ruling must be obeyed by all 27 member states of the EU and their national courts.

keith.nutall@uw-news.com