The European Court of Justice rules in Tom Kabinet that the exhaustion of rights in copyright has little place in the age of online digital formats (case comment)

Does EU copyright law facilitate the establishment and operation of second-hand markets, for copyright protected works (other than computer programme software) in digital format? This is the very important question that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) substantially answered when it handed down its much-awaited judgment in Case C-263/18 Tom Kabinet and Others on the 19 December 2019. The Grand Chamber of the CJEU has had to decide for the first time whether, the rule of the exhaustion of the right of distribution, established in the real world of copies in the form of objects, can be transposed to the virtual world of copies in the form of digital files