The Concept of Originality in Greece

Greece is an EU Member State. It has ratified all important international conventions in the area of copyright and related rights and belongs to the civil law tradition. Copyright Act 2121/1993 operates a high standard of protection for authors and related rights’ holders. Originality is the only basic requirement for a work to be protected by copyright. The Greek standard of originality was for a work to be ‘statistically unique’ meaning that no other author, under similar circumstances and with the same aim in mind, would reasonably reach the same creative outcome. After the recent developments in the CJEU case law, and especially after the Infopaq case, EU Member States can no longer operate their own criterion of originality, as the EU one prevails. According to it, a work is original if it is its author’s own intellectual creation, meaning that the author should have made free and creative choices and should have stamped the work with his personal touch.