European Union – Copyright. The Court of Justice of the European Union gave a preliminary ruling, deciding that arts 2(a) and 3(1) of Directive (EC) 2001/29 should be interpreted as precluding national legislation, such as that at issue in the main proceedings, that gave an approved collecting society the right to authorise the reproduction and communication to the public in digital form of 'out-of-print' books, namely, books published in France before 1 January 2001 which were no longer commercially distributed by a publisher and were not currently published in print or in digital form, while allowing the authors of those books, or their successors in title, to oppose or put an end to that practice, on the conditions that that legislation laid down.