Abstract European Union (EU) copyright law treats the concepts of ‘work’ and ‘originality’ as autonomous notions of EU law, intended to secure a uniform ‘fair balance’ across the Single Market. Lithuania is a revealing stress-test of that autonomy. Although the Lithuanian Copyright Law can be read in the EU law conforming way, the Supreme Court of Lithuania (Lietuvos Aukščiausiasis Teismas, LAT) has sustained a self-referential doctrine on protectable subject matter—an ‘originality presumption’, ‘objective originality’ as a lower threshold, category-based ‘degrees of originality’ and a methodological insistence on assessing originality by reference to the work ‘as a whole’. These devices unduly expand protection for functional and normatively constrained documents, public education materials, etc. This article analyses the Lithuanian trajectory through the key LAT decisions, identifies the points of incompatibility with EU-autonomous concepts and explains their institutional persistence. Such divergences produce systematic over-protection, privatization of information and regulatory compliance content, distortion of competition, chilling effects on expression and business autonomy and fragmentation of the internal market. They support the case for further EU-level clarification of protectability and more effective remedies when courts of last instance deviate from EU law.
Mindaugas Kiškis (Tue,) studied this question.