The influence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on national courts in copyright cases

The paper speculates on the influence of the case law of the Court of Justice on Member States’ authorities in the interpretation of copyright law. Looking at the recent stances concerning the role of digital platforms hosting copyrighted content, the author observes that in spite of the important set of judgments handed down by the Court, its case law still seems to suffer from some vagueness in a variety of respects. The lack of crystal-clear guidelines would prevent national courts from taking advantage of a certain degree of harmonisation and uniformity, a gap that the Digital Single Market Directive seems to be equally unable to fill.