The plaintiff had written a work which ‘collects and reduces into the form of a systematic course of instruction those questions which he may find ordinary persons asking in reference to the common phenomena of life, with answers to those questions, and explanations of those phenomena.’ He had provided answers to those questions out of works consulted by him and had arranged the whole ‘under certain heads and in a scientific form’.
Held: The court expressed the principle thus: ‘if, knowing that a person whose work is protected by copyright has, with considerable labour, compiled from various sources a work in itself not original, but which he has digested and arranged, you, being minded to compile a work of a like description, instead of taking the pains of searching into all the common sources, and obtaining your subject matter from them, avail yourself of the labour of your predecessor, adopt his arrangements, adopt moreover the very questions he has asked, or adopt them with but a light degree of colourable imitation, and thus save yourself pains and labour by availing yourself of the pains and labour which he has employed, that I take to be illegitimate use.’
Judges:
Page Wood V-C
Citations:
(1857) 3 KandJ 708
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Navitaire Inc v Easyjet Airline Co and Another ChD 30-Jul-2004
The claimant alleged infringement of its copyright in a software system which dealt with airline reservations. It was not said that any code had been copied, but merely that an express requirement of the defendant ordering the system was that it . .
Cited – Ravenscroft v Herbert ChD 1980
The plaintiff had written a non-fiction book entitled ‘The Spear of Destiny.’ He claimed infringement of copyright by the defendant in his book of fiction called ‘The Spear’. Both books were centered on a spear exhibited in Vienna, said to have been . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Intellectual Property
Updated: 24 November 2022; Ref: scu.220471