Brussels, 10/10/2008 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 9 October, the Court of Justice ruled that a compilation of poems created by the German company Directmedia may constitute an unauthorised "extraction" from another compilation, which the company is thought to have consulted when choosing the texts. The original compilation, "The 1100 most important poems in German literature between 1730 and 1900", is a list of poems which the University of Freiburg-in-Brisgau (Germany) published on the Internet. This list served as an inspiration for the compilation "1000 poems everyone must have", made by Directmedia. The University asserted its rights as the author of the anthology, which it believed Directmedia's actions had infringed. The company argued that it had carefully selected some poems from the list, and that this selection meant that there had not been an "extraction" in the sense of directive 96/9/EC of the Parliament and Council on the protection of databases. The Court, on the other hand, took the view that in the event of the transfer of a substantial part of the database, it can be judged to be an "extraction", even without the mechanical reproduction of the information. Directmedia's compilation includes, amongst others, 876 poems dating from the period between 1790 and 1900, 856 of which also feature on the list published by the University. It is now up to the court which referred the case, the Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court), to decide whether this constitutes the reproduction of a "substantial part" of the information. It is worth noting that the dispute is not about the copyright of the texts, which Directmedia has obtained independently. It is about the intellectual property of the list of the titles selected, which constitutes the "database" in this case (case 304/07). (C.D./trans.fl)