The European Court of Justice last week delivered its judgment in this important case for photographers, largely upholding the Advocate General’s Opinion reported in detail in our April 2011 bulletin.
The judgment confirms that portrait photographs enjoy the same copyright protection in the EU as other photographs and artistic works. To suggest otherwise may seem absurd, but this was one of a number of defences put forward by German and Austrian newspapers and websites who had published photographs of an abducted girl by a freelance photographer without a licence. The test, in essence, is whether the photographer has stamped his or her individual mark on the work.