Designs created in the U.S. are copyrighted here in the EU under the European harmonized rules of copyright.
Protection of applied art designs
This case is about the design of chairs; the Dining Sidechair Wood, created for a furniture design competition in the US (for the MoMa in New York). Vitra, as the rights holder to that chair, is bringing infringement proceedings against Kwantum, which marketed a chair under the name "Paris chair" that Vitra claims infringes its copyrights to the Dining Sidechair Wood.
The Dutch Supreme Court earlier this year questioned the European Court, whether protection can be granted to a work of applied art originating from a third country and whose author is not a national of a member state, based on the so-called substantive reciprocity rules. Those rules mean, in short, that works of applied art originating from countries where those works are protected exclusively as drawings or designs can only claim such protection in the other countries, and thus not also copyright protection.
Copyright protection
Under Directive 2001/29 ("Copyright Directive'), works in the EU are protected against, among other things, their reproduction, and making such reproductions available to the public.
Reproductions are defined as follows, namely, authors under copyright law with respect to their works have the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit the direct or indirect, temporary or permanent, total or partial reproduction of such material, by any means and in any form. Authors shall in addition have the exclusive right to permit or prohibit any form of distribution to the public of the original of their works or copies thereof, by sale or otherwise.
Operation of the Copyright Directive
The Court ruled today in a important copyright judgment that a situation in which an undertaking claims copyright protection for an object of applied art marketed in a Member State falls within the material scope of Union law, provided that that object can be considered a "work" within the meaning of the Copyright Directive.
The Court has previously held that an object can qualify as a "work" within the meaning of the Copyright Directive if two cumulative conditions are met: 1) the object in question must be original, in the sense that it is the creator's own intellectual creation, and 2) only the components that are the expression of such intellectual creation qualify as a "work."
Copyright protection
The Court finds that the EU legislature, in enacting the Copyright Directive, necessarily assumed all worksfor which protection is sought in the territory of the Union. Nor, according to the Court, does the Copyright Directive contain criteria regarding the country of origin of those works or the nationality of the author:
"In this regard, it should be noted that those provisions do not expressly state whether the term "work" referred to therein includes a work of applied art originating in a third country, nor whether the term "author" within the meaning of those provisions extends to the author of such a work who is a national of a third country (...) Where an object qualifies as a 'work' within the meaning of Directive 2001/29, [it must] enjoy copyright protection in that capacity in accordance with that directive, to which it should be added that the directive does not impose any conditions as to the country of origin of the work in question or the nationality of the author.’
If the aforementioned reciprocity test did apply, then works of applied art from third countries could potentially be treated differently:
Application by a Member State of that substantive reciprocity test would not only be contrary to the wording of those provisions, as the Advocate General emphasized in paragraph 53 of his Opinion, but would also undermine the objective of that Directive, namely the harmonization of copyright in the internal market. Indeed, if that test were applied, works of applied art from third countries would potentially be treated differently in different member states under treaty provisions applicable bilaterally between a member state and a third country.'
The Court says it is solely for the EU legislature to determine whether copyright attribution can be restricted in the Union. SMore to the point, EU member states no longer have the power to apply the substantive reciprocity provisions.
Conclusion
EU member states may thus not, by way of derogation from the provisions of Union law, apply the aforementioned substantive-reciprocity test to works whose country of origin is the United States of America.
This means that works originating in the U.S. can also be protected simply here in the EU, without the need to determine whether they are protected in the U.S. solely as drawings or designs. This gives wide scope for protection of works (of applied art) originating in the US in the EU.
