European Union – Intellectual property rights. The Court of Justice of the European Union gave a preliminary ruling in which it decided that the concept of 'communication to the public', within the meaning of art 3(1) of Directive (EC) 2001/29, should be interpreted as covering, in circumstances such as those at issue in the main proceedings, the making available and management, on the internet, of a sharing platform which, by means of indexation of metadata referring to protected works and the provision of a search engine, allowed users of that platform to locate those works and to share them in the context of a peer-to-peer network.