In a ruling on October 9, in a dispute referred from Germany, the Court said that if someone consults an online database, assesses its contents, and then transfers the data to another database, that action "is capable of constituting an 'extraction'".

However, the transfer must amount to either a substantial part of the database, or to the repeated or systematic extraction of insubstantial parts resulting in the reconstruction of a substantial part.

It is for the national court to decide if this condition is met.

The case arose over an online database of German poems from 1730 to 1900 created by Professor Ulrich Knoop of the University of Freiburg.

A company called Directmedia subsequently produced a CD-ROM, "1,000 poems everyone should have", in which 856 of the 876 poems from 1720 to 1900 also appear on the University's list.

Digitalmedia acknowledged that it consulted the University's list when preparing its own list, but it took the texts of the poems from its own resources.

After the lower courts sided with the University and Knoop, the Bundesgerichtshof asked the ECJ to clarify whether use such as Directmedia's constitutes an "extraction" of data, under the EU Database Directive.

In its ruling, the Court said that "extraction" refers to any unauthorised act of appropriation of the whole or part of the contents of a database, regardless of the nature and form of the mode of operation used.

This means that "even a manual recopying of the contents of such a database to another medium corresponds to the concept of extraction in the same way as downloading or photocopying" said the Court.

The Court's ruling is in line with the Advocate General's opinion.