Europe’s Human Rights Court rules for the first time on a breach of a copyright holder’s right to property in a private dispute

The European Court of Human Rights has recently ruled that the domestic courts’ failure to justify the grounds for dismissing the applicant’s copyright infringement claim in a private-party dispute concerning the unauthorized online reproduction of the applicant’s book breached the latter’s human right to property. Notably, the Court was not satisfied with the fact that the national courts had not persuasively explained their conclusions regarding the applicability in the applicant’s case of digital exhaustion and of copyright exceptions for libraries and private copying.