Skip to main content

Is there a EU Copyright Jurispruence? An empirical analysis of the workings of the European Court of Justice.

Favale, M., Kretschmer, M. and Torremns, P.T., 2016. Is there a EU Copyright Jurispruence? An empirical analysis of the workings of the European Court of Justice. Modern Law Review, 79 (1), 31-75.

Full text available as:

[img]
Preview
PDF
ECJ Copyright Jurisprudence-3ed RESUBMISSION-MF (1).pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

991kB

DOI: 10.1111/1468-2230.12166

Abstract

The Court of Justice of the European Union has seen a dramatic and controversial increase in copyright cases during the last decade. This study investigates empirically two claims: (i) that the Court has failed to develop a coherent copyright jurisprudence (lacking domain expertise, copyright specific reasoning, and predictability); (ii) that the Court has pursued an activist, harmonising agenda (resorting to teleological interpretation of European law).We analyse the allocation of copyright and database right cases by Chambers of the Court, Advocate General (AG) and Reporting Judge, and investigate the biographical background of the Judges and AGs sitting. We trace patterns of reasoning in the Court’s approach through quantitative content analysis. We identify the legal topoi that are employed in the opinions and decisions, and then link the occurrence of these topoi to the outcome of each case. The results show that private law and in particular intellectual property law expertise is almost entirely missing from the Court. However, we find that the Court has developed a mechanism for enabling judicial learning through the systematic assignment of cases to certain Judges and AGs. We also find that the Court has developed a “fair balance” topos linked to judge Malenovský (rapporteur on 24 out of 40 copyright cases) that does not predict an agenda of upward harmonisation, with about half of judgements narrowing rather than widening the scope of copyright protection.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:0026-7961
Group:Faculty of Media & Communication
ID Code:31081
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:28 Aug 2018 09:00
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 14:12

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

More statistics for this item...
Repository Staff Only -