choices the author is able to express his creative abilities, and so the author can stamp
the work with his ‘‘personal touch’’, to use the language of the CJEU in Painer.
Finally the Football DataCo case revolved around a database concerning football
fixture lists and it the AG & Court both held that exercising skill and labour is not
sufficient to gain copyright protection, ‘copyright protection is conditional upon the
database being characterised by a ‘creative’ aspect, and it is not sufficient that the
creation of the database required labour and skill’ and ‘the fact that the setting up of the
database required... significant labour and skill of its author... cannot as such justify the
protection of it by copyright. This statements means, ‘the ECJ has expressly
confirmed, if it could not be inferred already from Infopaq, that those traditional
stalwarts when assessing originality under English copyright law no longer have any
place. Therefore exercising skill and labour cannot amount to originality, ‘the ECJ's
position is clear; the selection or arrangement of data contained in a database must
amount to an original expression of the creative freedom of its author... to qualify for
protection. Football DataCo confirmed the UK approach is insufficient meaning the
Meltwater interpretation of Infopaq is incorrect, ‘the court [Meltwater] misunderstood
the Infopaq ruling of the CJEU; indeed, it is illogical to say that just because intellectual
creation is a question of origin rather than novelty or merit, this must necessarily result
in the English test of originality not being qualified by the Infopaq test, without at least