The Grand Chamber’s 12 May 2026 judgment in Case C-797/23 closed one of the most closely watched copyright disputes to reach Luxembourg this year. Meta Platforms Ireland had asked the Lazio Regional Administrative Court to set aside AGCOM Decision No 3/23/CONS and the Italian remuneration framework that flowed from Article 43-bis of Law No 633/1941. The Italian court referred the compatibility questions to the Court of Justice. The answer that came back has reshaped how Article 15 of the Digital Single Market Directive can be implemented at national level.
The legal heart of the ruling sits in the Court’s reading of Article 15 of Directive 2019/790. Meta had argued the Article establishes only an exclusive right for press publishers to authorise reproduction and online making available of their content, and not a free-standing remuneration right that a regulator can size and enforce. The Grand Chamber rejected that. EU law, the Court held, does not preclude national legislation that combines the exclusive right with a layer of regulated contractual freedom, in which the regulator steps in to determine fair compensation once direct negotiations have failed. AGCOM’s role as arbiter survives, and the Italian model does not stray outside the perimeter of the DSM Directive.
Three procedural levers were upheld. The first is the data disclosure obligation. Platforms must hand over the information needed to compute fair compensation, including audience and revenue data tied to the press content concerned. Without that, the Court reasoned, neither the publisher nor the regulator can run a credible calculation, and the exclusive right would be hollow in practice. The second lever is the anti-retaliation rule. Platforms cannot reduce the visibility of press content during the negotiation period as a pressure tactic, because doing so would defeat the protective purpose of Article 15. The third lever is enforcement. National regulators can impose penalties on platforms that refuse to comply with the information-sharing obligation, and the penalty architecture sits inside the protective scheme that the directive was designed to enable.
The ruling has not handed publishers a remuneration right that runs automatically. The Court was careful to describe the AGCOM intervention as a regulated contractual freedom rather than a tariff. Once the regulator has set an amount, the parties remain free not to conclude a contract. That preserves the negotiation logic of the directive, while removing the practical incapacity of small and medium publishers to extract terms from very large platforms acting in bilateral isolation.
The implications reach well beyond the Po Valley. France’s neighbouring rights scheme and Germany’s transposition under section 87f of the Copyright Act now sit in front of an authoritative reading that other member state regulators can lean on. The European Newspaper Publishers Association welcomed the judgment within hours of release. Meta has not commented on whether it will redirect its compliance posture toward the AGCOM dialogue or continue running the file through national courts. The Berlaymont’s own internal review of the DSM Directive transposition is due to feed into the broader copyright file under DG CNECT this year, and the Court’s framing of regulated contractual freedom is likely to anchor the analysis.
For platform counsel, the practical takeaway is sharper. The data disclosure obligation is now anchored in CJEU case law rather than in regulator practice notes. Refusing to share calculation inputs no longer carries an arguable claim that Article 15 covers it.
