One focus of the European Union’s Digital Agenda is to break down barriers to cross-border exploitation of intellectual property rights. Consistent with this goal, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has recently dismantled one such barrier to harmonisation by ruling that a copyright owner has the right to bring infringement proceedings in any EU country in which allegedly infringing material is made available or accessible online. The decision is welcome news for content owners, although there remain national limitations on the damage that can be recovered.

The case, Pez Hejduk v EnergieAgentur.NRW GmbH, arose as a result of the posting of allegedly infringing photos on a “.de” website by a German company. The Austrian photographer who owned the copyright to the photographs complained and brought a legal action in the Austrian courts. One element of EnergieAgentur’s defence was that the claim should have been brought in the German courts where it was domiciled and where any alleged infringement occurred.