By order of 28 November 2023, the Court of Cassation affirmed that the jurisdiction of the Specialized Corporate Chamber, pursuant to Article 3(1)(b) of Legislative Decree 168/2003, subsist only if the litigation specifically involves the discipline of copyright law and not matters of common law incidental to copyright law.
The case
The present decision originated from a case of opposition to an injunction pending in front of the Justice of the Peace of Messina, concerning the payment of professional expenses relating to the translation into Italian of a text in a foreign language (by a Turkish author), carried out by the translator in favour of a publishing house, plaintiff in the opposition proceedings. The Justice of the Peace had declined jurisdiction in favour of the Specialized Corporate Chamber of the Court of Palermo, which in turn had held that it lacked jurisdiction, thus raising ex officio the question of jurisdiction pursuant to Article 45 of the Code of Civil Procedure before the Court of Cassation. The judges of legitimacy, examined the facts of the litigation and held that in the case at hand, the publishing house had merely challenged the translator's credit claim by virtue of an allegedly poor quality of the translation itself. According to the claims of the claimant, the remuneration requested by the translator resulted from the translation activity alone, and not also from a hypothetical assignment of rights; at the same time, no other copyright profile was involved. The simple litigation concerning the translator's right to receive remuneration for his professional activity, therefore, implied a decision only on questions of common law, for which, according to the Court of Cassation, there was no reason to attribute the dispute to the Specialized Corporate Chamber. As a consequence, the Court of Cassation declared the jurisdiction of the ordinary judge, in this case the Justice of the Peace of Messina, remanding the parties to the latter for the continuation of the judgment on the merits.
The competence of the Specialized Corporate Chamber and copyright
Legislative Decree 168/2003 established specialised sections on industrial and intellectual property, subsequently extending their competences to business matters by Law Decree 1/2012. Article 3(1)(b) includes litigations concerning copyright and related rights, but does not clarify whether this extends to contracts concerning such rights. Although there are a number of diverging interpretations in case law, the Supreme Court has ruled that litigation dealing with image rights or incidental copyright issues does not fall within the jurisdiction of the specialised sections.
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