Article 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, Article 3 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights and Article 1 of Directive 2006/116/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2006 on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights, read in conjunction with Articles 17 and 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union,

must be interpreted as not precluding national legislation under which the admissibility of an action for infringement of the copyright in a collective work is conditional on all the joint holders of that copyright being called on to participate in the proceedings, provided that the interpretation and application of that legislation do not render the procedure provided for unnecessarily complicated or costly and that that procedure does not render it impossible or excessively difficult for that action to be brought by only one or some of the co-authors. The national court must, in any event, guarantee respect for the right to effective judicial protection enshrined in Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Articles 3 and 14 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights must be interpreted as precluding national legislation or an interpretation thereof which does not allow the court before which an action is brought under that directive to take due account, in each case brought before it, of its specific characteristics for the purposes of assessing whether the legal costs incurred by the successful party are reasonable and proportionate.

Inasmuch as the provisions of Articles 2(1) and 3(2) of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, interpreted in the light of Article 2(1) of the Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, signed in Paris on 20 March 1883, last revised at Stockholm on 14 July 1967 and amended on 28 September 1979, and of Article 41(1) and (2) of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which constitutes Annex 1C to the Agreement establishing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) signed at Marrakesh on 15 April 1994 and approved by Council Decision 94/800/EC of 22 December 1994 concerning the conclusion on behalf of the European Community, as regards matters within its competence, of the agreements reached in the Uruguay Round multilateral negotiations (1986-1994), are not applicable to an invalidation procedure such as that at issue in the main proceedings, those provisions do not preclude that, in such judicial proceedings, the court:

- is not bound by the claims and other statements made by the parties and is entitled to order of its own motion the production of any evidence that it may deem necessary;

- is not bound by an administrative decision made in relation to an application for invalidation or by the findings of fact in that decision, and

- is not entitled to re-examine evidence which was already submitted in connection with a previous application for invalidation.