Cases Intellectual Property
Judgment Date: 22 Aug 2021
The High Court has handed down judgment in a high-profile entertainment case between members of the Sex Pistols. Both sides of the dispute were represented by barristers from Maitland Chambers.
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Judgment Date: 17 Jun 2021
A new judgment of the Patents Court in London contains an important discussion of the circumstances in which a transaction by a company will be treated as ultra vires and void as an unlawful distribution to a shareholder at common law.
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Judgment Date: 06 Jun 2019
The Court of Appeal considered two appeals concerning a decision on an unfair prejudice claim brought by a minority shareholder.
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Judgment Date: 13 Jun 2018
Trade mark owners who obtained website-blocking injunctions against internet service providers who were innocent conduits in relation to infringing activity carried out on websites to which they provided access, were required to indemnify the internet service providers against the costs of complying with the injunctions.
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Judgment Date: 19 Mar 2014
A claim brought against broadcasting entities that a television show they had launched had been developed using a business proposal submitted to them by the claimant was struck out in its entirety where the claimant had failed to adduce any material facts on which allegations of dishonesty and conspiracy might be based. Accordingly, the claim had no real prospect of success.
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Judgment Date: 17 Apr 2013
The Supreme Court proposed to refer to the European Court of Justice the issue of whether copies of protected material temporarily retained in the internet cache or on the end-user's screen fell within the exception provided for by Directive 2001/29 art.5(1).
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Judgment Date: 28 Feb 2013
The court issued a blocking injunction requiring six internet service providers to block customers' access to three peer-to-peer file-sharing websites. The service providers knew that customers were using the services to download copyrighted sound recordings without permission, and a blocking injunction was proportionate in the circumstances.
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Judgment Date: 30 Jul 2012
A limited liability partnership which had provided a bridging loan to finance a concert was entitled to recover the full amount due from the concert organiser. Under the terms of a debenture, the lender was entitled to existing and future copyright in sound and film recordings of the concert as security for the loan.
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Judgment Date: 20 Feb 2012
The downloading and uploading of music industry sound recordings by the operators and users of a peer-to-peer file-sharing website infringed the copyrights of record companies in the United Kingdom.
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Judgment Date: 27 Jul 2011
A web end-user licence was required to lawfully use and receive content in the form of clippings and headlines sourced by media monitoring organisations that trawled a multitude of websites using search terms selected by the end-user. That was because the copies passed on to the end-users were not covered by the web database licences issued to the monitoring organisations. The end-user licence was only needed where the content passed on to the end-user constituted a substantial part of the original work.
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Judgment Date: 27 May 2011
Provided that the Copyright Tribunal discharged its statutory duty under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.126 to determine the terms of a licence that were reasonable in the circumstances by having regard to comparable schemes and licences as well as all other relevant considerations, then the precise way in which it carried out its analysis and the order in which it addressed the material issues in its decision could not undermine the validity of its conclusions.
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Judgment Date: 09 Dec 2010
By making copies of newspaper back-issues available to the public on a website a newspaper publisher had infringed the copyright of a photographer whose images had been printed in some of those newspapers as such exploitation by electronic means was different in kind from the exploitation of existing hard copies that had originally been contemplated by the parties.
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Judgment Date: 26 Nov 2010
Companies had infringed newspapers' copyright by using a media monitoring service from a third party which provided them with copies of headlines and extracts from articles on newspaper websites. A web end-user licence was required to lawfully use and receive the third party's service.
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Judgment Date: 02 Nov 2010
A provision in an assignment of copyright allowing automatic reverter of the rights to the assignor on a future event, namely an unremedied material breach of contract by the assignee, was a valid partial assignment within the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.90(2).
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Judgment Date: 10 Aug 2010
The Copyright Tribunal had erred, in determining the terms on which a broadcaster should be licensed to use a licensing body's music video repertoire in the operation of its television music channels, in reaching a decision on royalties without considering a relevant comparable licence. That was contrary to the correct approach, which involved starting with the most relevant comparable and adapting it to the circumstances of the particular case.
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Judgment Date: 27 Jul 2005
Transactions between a company and a shadow director were voidable unless the requisite formalities had been observed. Where a person became a shadow director by virtue of the fact that the board of directors became accustomed to acting on his instructions, transactions entered into between the parties before that point in time were not retrospectively invalidated.
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Judgment Date: 02 Feb 2004
On an application by the claimant for summary judgment, where the defendant had admitted that it had no defence to the claim of copyright infringement, judgment had to be entered, even though the defendant had sought an adjournment.
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Judgment Date: 17 Jun 2003
A photograph taken at a photo shoot had not been commissioned. The photographer owned the copyright in the photograph and was entitled to a remedy regarding the unauthorised use of that photograph by a record company.
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Judgment Date: 20 Dec 2001
The designer of a mechanical ventilator who was a former director and employee of the claimant companies was not guilty of passing off or misuse of trade secrets or confidential information by setting up a competing business. However, the investors in the claimant companies were entitled to enforce an undertaking given by him that he would not compete with them.
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Judgment Date: 30 Mar 2000
Section 129 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 was not limited to a comparison between licences granted by the same person. The fact that narrowcasters were exempt from the site licence fee which commercial dubbers had to pay was a relevant factor for the Copyright Tribunal to consider when deciding on the royalty rate that a dubbing company should pay to Phonographic Performance Ltd. * Leave to appeal to the House of Lords refused.
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