CJEU: a Facebook post is a copyright work — length and platform are irrelevant

On 3 September 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in C-598/24 Gândul Media Network that a text posted on a social network qualifies as a “work” under Article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29 — provided it is the expression of the author’s own intellectual creation. Short length, online publication and the absence of any recognised literary genre are, the Court held, all irrelevant to protection.

The case

The facts could not be more ordinary. In September 2021 a Romanian teacher reposted on her Facebook page a text she had written in 2018 — a “short guide for parents at the start of the school year”, explaining why she did not want gifts from her pupils’ parents. Six days later the online outlet Gândul republished the text in full, without her consent; her name and a link to the original post were added only after she objected in the comments.

The Bucharest Tribunal, and then the Bucharest Court of Appeal, refused her copyright claim on the ground that the text “lacked an artistic dimension”. Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice referred the question to Luxembourg.

What the Court held

The CJEU answered on established principles rather than inventing a special regime for online content. A creation is a “work” if it meets two cumulative, objective conditions from the Infopaq–Cofemel line of case law: originality — free and creative choices reflecting the author’s personality — and identifiability with sufficient precision and objectivity. The “artistic value” test applied by the Romanian courts has no place in the analysis.

Paragraph 25 of the judgment is the operative sentence for anyone enforcing rights online: for the purposes of classifying a text as a work, its length, the fact that it was posted online, and whether it belongs to a predetermined literary genre are all irrelevant — unless those factors result from constraints that left no room for creative freedom. The Court even went a step further than preliminary rulings usually do, observing that on the facts before it the teacher’s post did appear to reflect free and creative choices.

The second answer draws the boundary. Reproduction by the press can fall within the “reporting of current events” exception in Article 5(3)(c), and Romania’s rule permitting only short extracts is compatible with EU law. But the Romanian condition that such use bring “no direct or indirect commercial or economic advantage” is not: media outlets pursue an economic activity by nature, and a blanket exclusion of commercial use would gut the exception and upset the balance between Article 17 (intellectual property) and Article 11 (freedom of the press) of the Charter.

What this means for you

The short-form content your brand produces and that others scrape daily — posts, captions, product descriptions, community threads, knowledge-base snippets — is not a copyright grey zone. After C-598/24, the question in any EU takedown is only whether the text reflects free and creative choices, not whether it is long enough, “artistic” enough, or published in the right format. That makes notice-and-action mechanisms — from platform copyright forms to DSA Article 16 notices — directly available against wholesale republication of your content.

The limit runs the other way too: where a genuine current event justifies it, press and press-like outlets may quote your material — including commercially — within the extent the informatory purpose justifies. The exception covers reporting; it does not cover the content farms that repost entire feeds without any reporting purpose at all.

Counsel’s note. Most brands see their posts and product copy scraped, shrug, and reserve copyright enforcement for “real” works — photos, videos, long-form guides. That instinct just became obsolete: the CJEU has confirmed that the same objective test protects a 300-word post and a 300-page book alike. The working method is to treat recurring scrapers as copyright infringers from the first notice — document the original publication, notify the platform at the source, and escalate to the host where platforms stall. We broke the takedown sequence down in our guide to legal content removal.