Creative Commons

Since the creation of what at the time was called European Community, as far as copyright laws across Europe are concerned, there have been acute differences across the various jurisdictions of Member States and especially between the common law tradition of the UK and Ireland and that of the prevalent civil law in continental Europe. Through the years, these differences have caused major problems in the Internal Market and the EU has been trying to resolve them. In recent decades, the originality standard, which constitutes the only prerequisite for the protection of a work by copyright law, has been further clarified and reached an important extent of harmonization across the Union, as far as the subject - matter covered by it is concerned (software, database and photographs), in particular through the respective Directives issued, but also in recent years, on the basis of several judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), including Infopaq, BSA, Football Association, Football Dataco and Painer. This dissertation attempts to evaluate the contribution of this legislation and case law on the harmonization of EU copyright law, the implications of this harmonization on domestic laws of Member States such as the UK, Germany and Greece and what could be further done, in order for a more substantial harmonization to be achieved, possibly through a uniform law on copyright, especially after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty Reform, which makes an EU Regulation on copyright law seem more feasible than ever before