Productores de Música de España (Promusicae) v Telefónica de España SAU

Balancing fundamental rights: EU law does not require Member States to lay down an obligation to communicate personal data in order to ensure effective protection of copyright in the context of civil proceedings. However, EU law requires that Member States take care to rely on an interpretation of the directives they transpose which allows a fair balance to be struck between the various fundamental rights protected.

The present reference for a preliminary ruling thus raises the question of the need to reconcile the requirements of the protection of different fundamental rights, namely the right to respect for private life on the one hand and the rights to protection of property and to an effective remedy on the other.

The mechanisms allowing those different rights and interests to be balanced are contained, first, in Directive 2002/58 itself, in that it provides for rules which determine in what circumstances and to what extent the processing of personal data is lawful and what safeguards must be provided for, and in the three directives mentioned by the national court, which reserve the cases in which the measures adopted to protect the rights they regulate affect the protection of personal data. Second, they result from the adoption by the Member States of national provisions transposing those directives and their application by the national authorities (see, to that effect, with reference to Directive 95/46, Lindqvist, paragraph 82).