Art & Allposters International v Stichting Pictoright, European Court of Justice
Allposters markets posters and reproductions of famous painters. Pictoright is a Dutch collecting society. Pictoright objected to Allposters’ sale of posters that had been turned into works on canvasses by transferring the images from poster form through a chemical process into canvas. Allposters argued that this was not copyright infringement as the copyright owners’ rights in the European Union had been “exhausted” when they first placed the items for sale in the EU, in line with EU intellectual property law.
Following a reference from the Dutch courts, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU law’s exhaustion principle did not apply to copies that were offered for sale in another medium from those which had already been sold in the EU with their consent. In other words, the copyright owner could still object to a future sale if the medium had been altered by someone else – in this case, from poster to canvas. This effectively made it a new reproduction of that work that had not been approved.
The ECJ also clarified that the exhaustion of rights principle applied to each individual tangible item. It only dealt with the position for physical items and this ruling did not address what this would mean in the context of the marketing of digital rights.
