• You acknowledge the Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited website as the source of the extracted material. You must include such acknowledgement and the Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited website address in the copy of the extracted material.
• You inform the third party that these conditions apply to him or her and that he / she must comply with them.
• You recopy the extracted material in complete and unmodified form.
  

This licence to re-copy does not permit incorporation of the extracted material or any part of it in any other work or publication, whether in hard copy or electronic or any other form. In particular (but without limitation) no part of the Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited website may be distributed or recopied for any commercial purpose or for a fee. Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited reserves the right at any time at its discretion to withdraw or modify the licences set out above.

Links to Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited's website:

Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited reserves the right at its discretion to prohibit any link from another Internet site or equivalent entity to materials or information on this site. Without prejudice to that, any link to material or information on this site must be neither misleading nor deceptive and must fairly indicate Temple Consultants (Nottingham) Limited or www.Templesols .com as the destination of the link.

Browsing

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has in June 2014 confirmed that browsing the internet (without downloading or printing) does not require permission of the copyright owner because browsing per se falls under the temporary copying exemption under Article 5.1 of the Information Society Directive (2001/29/EC) (implemented via Section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA)).

The CJEU decision in the Meltwater case (Public Relations Consultants Associations Ltd v The Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd and others) Case C-360/13 confirms the views expressed by the UK Supreme Court in its provisional decision in the case in April 2013, that there is no place for regulating casual browsing on the internet through enforcing copyright.
Business Impact

This decision confirms that those who browse the internet are not at risk of any unintentional liability for copyright infringement simply by through the act of viewing websites. For those involved in the administration of rights, it confirms that the operation of the internet,as far as browsing is concerned, is not dependent on wide ranging implied licences.

The CJEU decision determines the position only for browsing. It does not therefore give internet users any comfort that printing or downloading material, or storing it on an email, is equally permitted.

The CJEU relied on the fact that when material is published on the internet, the website publisher is required to obtain the copyright owners permission. As such, the proviso in Article 5.5 that any temporary copying exemption should not conflict with normal exploitation of the work and not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holders was also met for browsing. This will inevitably throw the focus of copyright owners back on to the need to police the posting of their copyright works on the internet in the first place.

Background

The CJEU decision arose from a reference made by the UK Supreme Court in July 2013 following its provisional decision an appeal brought by the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) in the long running Meltwater case. The case was initially brought by the Newspaper Licensing Agency against Meltwater News, a media monitoring organisation providing internet links to its customers which grouped together relevant news items for them to read.

The NLA (the collecting society for newspapers) argued that both Meltwater and its customers needed a licence to deliver and receive the service. In the course of the litigation, Meltwater accepted that it needed a licence and therefore dropped out of the litigation. However the NLA maintained that Meltwater's customers also needed licences.

The PRCA (an association of public relations professionals) then took up the fight on behalf of its members (many of whom were Meltwater customers) to argue that no licence was required for the mere viewing of information on a website.

The UK Court of Appeal held that the end users did need a licence to view the material on the internet. On appeal, the Supreme Court disagreed, and held that no such licence was necessary as the acts involved in viewing material on a website could fall under the temporary coping exemption under Article 5.1 of the Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC (Section 28A of the CDPA) because they met the 5 criteria laid down in that article.

However, as the court recognised this was an issue "with a transnational dimension" and implications for millions of internet users across the EU, it made a reference to the CJEU seeking confirmation of the interpretation of Article 5.1.

Article 5.1 of Directive 2001/29 provides an exemption to the reproduction right for acts of reproduction that meet the relevant criteria.

The criteria are that an act of reproduction:

*should be temporary, in that it is transient or incidental,
*is an integral part and essential part of a technological process,
* its sole purpose is to enable a transmission or lawful use of a work to be made and
*it has no independent economic significance.
The UK Supreme Court considered that the last 2 of these requirements (sole purpose and no independent economic significance) were met on the circumstances of the Meltwater case. However, it required guidance on whether the first 3 criteria also applied. The formulation of the question referred was careful to prescribe the exact circumstances under consideration, so the CJEU ruling must be viewed in that context.

The question referred to the CJEU was as follows:

In circumstances where:

*An end user views a web-page without downloading, printing or otherwise setting out to make a copy of it;
Copies of that web-page are automatically made on screen and in the internet cache on the end-user's hard disk;

*The creation of those copies is indispensable to the technical processes involved in correct and efficient internet browsing;

*The screen copy remains on screen until the end-user moves away from the relevant web-page, when it is automatically deleted by the normal operation of the computer;

*The cached copy remains in the cache until it is overwritten by other material as the end-user views further web-pages, when it is automatically deleted by the operation of the computer;

*And the copies are retained for no longer than the ordinary processes associated with internet use referred to above;

*Are such copies (i) temporary (ii) transient or incidental and (iii) an integral and essential part of the technological process within the meaning of Article 5(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC?

The CJEU used the simplified procedure for this case, so there was no Advocate General's decision.

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