The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has declared in a recent judgement of the 24th of October 2024 (Case C-227/23) on a preliminary matter which aimed at determining the degree of protection from which an applied artwork benefits, when it originates from a non-EU country and when its author is not an EU national.
This preliminary ruling can be traced back to the litigation initiated by the Swiss company Vitra Collections AG against the Dutch and Belgian companies Kwantun Nederland BV and België BV, respectively. Vitra is a manufacturer of designer furniture and owner of all intellectual property rights to a chair, called the ‘Dining Sidechair Wood’, designed by the marriage of artists Charles and Ray Eames, both of American nationality. Kwantun and België commercialised in the Netherlands and in Belgium a chair, called the ‘Paris chair’, which, according to Vitra, would infringe its copyrights to the ‘Dining Sidechair Wood’.
Faced with this dispute, the CJEU, at first instance, had to determine whether EU law was applicable to a matter such as the one described above. To deal with this issue, the court reaffirmed that the scope of application of EU Directive 2001/29, relating to the alignment of certain aspects of copyrights and related rights, is not defined at the discretion of the country from which the artwork originates or by the nationality of its author, but rather by reference to the EU single market. In this regard, the court confirmed that ‘Dining Sidechair Wood’ could be qualified as an ‘artwork’ under the definition provided in the Directive and, therefore, must deserve the protection of copyrights conferred by it. The second preliminary ruling considered consisted of determining whether or not article 2.7 of the Berne Convention contradicts that set forth in the Directive. The Berne Convention establishes that, generally speaking, authors who are nationals of signatory countries of the Directive will benefit from the same rights as national authors in the other signatory countries. However, in the case of applied artworks, article 2.7 establishes an exception, by indicating that it shall be at the discretion of EU countries to regulate applied artworks, as well as the requirements for their protection. The article also establishes that, when the artworks are protected only as drawings and models in their origin country, a claim may not be made in another EU country for additional protection to the drawings and artworks above that conferred in the country of origin. In this way, the Convention imposes a requirement of substantial reciprocity.
Therefore, the CJEU had to determine whether EU member states have at their discretion the ability to decide themselves whether or not this requirement of reciprocity applies to applied artworks whose country of origin is a non-EU member state and whose author is not an EU national, in view of the fact that, if so, it would suppose a limitation to copyright law which is not foreseen in EU legislation.
EU Directive 2001/29 aims at circumventing substantial differences in the level of protection offered by and between EU member states and, consequently, avoiding restrictions to the free movement of goods and services which includes protected artworks, or which are inspired by them, which would lead to a fragmentation of the EU single market. This objective would not be met if the protection was only extended to artworks originating from an EU member state, or whose author is an EU national.
For this reason, the application of the requirement of substantial reciprocity foreseen in the aforementioned article 2.7, would result in that applied artworks originating from non-EU countries run the risk of being treated differently between EU member states, which would imply a breach of the objective at which the Directive 2001/29 aims. That being said, the CJEU concluded that article 2.7 supposes a limitation to copyrights contrary to the EU law, since it corresponds exclusively to the right of the EU to establish, as the case may be, limitations on the intellectual property rights conferred by EU legislation.
Joan Lluís Rubio
Vilá Abogados
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25th of October 2024
