The European Court of Justice confirms that internet streaming is an act of public communication
The European Court of Justice (CJEU), by means of its judgement of 7 March 2013, C-607/11 “ITV Broadcasting” dated March 7th, has clarified several issues regarding internet broadcasting (streaming) of third party´s (Tv) content. The case at hand brings cause of a preliminary ruling from the British High Court in the context of a case where ITV and some other TV stations sued TV Catchup for copyright infringement. The alleged infringing acts of the defendant consisted on enabling access on the internet (by live streaming) to content over which the plaintiffs had exclusive rights. This access was only enabled to users located within the UK and with the corresponding TV license. These acts were considered by the plaintiffs as public communication in the sense of Article 3.1 of the Directive 2001/29.Therefore, and since they were not authorized by the right holders, they constituted copyright infringement. With this factual background, and after the corresponding analysis the CJEU concludes that the concept of public communication includes streaming of third party´s content , even in those situations where this very same content might be legally accessible to end users on their TVs. The aforesaid conclusion, the Court adds, would not be modified in the event the enabling entity (the one enabling the streaming of the content) gets any profit of this, or the later be in direct competition with the content owner. The ruling embraces a wide interpretation of the concept of public communication, providing with it a high degree of protection to right holders (TV stations in this case). From the interpretation of the CJEU it is clear that any communication of copyrighted content made for a public that is not present in the spot where that communication is being carried out is to fall within the scope of Article Article 3.1 of the Directive 2001/29. Applying this criterion to the case at hand the CJEU concludes that the fact that right holders have previously carried out public communication acts (TV broadcasting) does not exhaust their rights and does not preclude them in order to ban a second public communication (internet streaming)
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