Court of Justice of the European Union, case C-723/22: the broadcast of an episode on television in rooms and other areas of a hotel constitutes a communication to the public Carlos Torres1 A hotel operator and a collective copyright management organisation (CMO) were involved in a dispute regarding an episode of a television series broadcast on a public channel. The CMO has alleged that the hotel violated its exclusive right to communicate with the public by making the episode available on televisions in the hotel rooms and the fitness area for guests to watch. The hotel, however, maintains that it obtained the necessary licenses for this purpose. The main legal question is whether this action constitutes a “communication to the public” under Article 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive. Keywords: Intellectual property, copyright, Directive 2001/29/EC, communication to the public, hotel television, cable distribution, retransmission, collective management organisations, licensing agreement. The case involves MPLC Deutschland GmbH, a German collective management organisation (CMO), and Citadines Betriebs GmbH, the operator of a hotel. Citadines transmitted the episode via television sets installed in its hotel rooms and fitness areas using the hotel’s cable distribution network. Citadines argued that it had obtained, in total, the required licence from the relevant copyright management organisations, for which it pays a flat-rate fee each year for each hotel room. The CMO disagreed and maintained that the licence in question did not cover the direct and indirect retransmission of radio and television programmes using a distribution network belonging to a hotel. The main legal question lies in determining whether such dissemination is subsumable under the concept of “communication to the public” by Article 3 (1) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of DOI 10.60559/ijtthl2024-018. 1 ESHTE.
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