Infopaq International provided media-monitoring services. It scanned newspapers, identified relevant articles and sent clients extracts of 11 words from the identified articles. The Danish publishers’ association argued that this practice amounted to unauthorised reproduction.
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The CJEU held that even an extract of 11 words can enjoy copyright protection if it expresses the author’s own intellectual creation. Quantity is not decisive. What matters is originality, meaning the reflection of the author’s creative choices in the selection and arrangement of words.
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This established at European level a uniform originality criterion: a work is protected if it is the author’s own intellectual creation, regardless of length or format. More restrictive national criteria were harmonised through this ruling.
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The practical implications are broad: press-clipping services, media monitoring, content aggregation and automated summarisation must take into account that short excerpts may be protected. Systematic reproduction of extracts, even for commercial monitoring purposes, requires licensing.