European Union – Intellectual property rights. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that art 4(2) of Directive (EC) 2001/29 (on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society) had to be interpreted as meaning that the rule of exhaustion of the distribution right set out in art 4(2) of that directive did not apply in a situation where a reproduction of a protected work, after having been marketed in the EU with the copyright holder's consent, had undergone an alteration of its medium, such as the transfer of that reproduction from a paper poster onto a canvas, and was placed on the market again in its new form