The plaintiffs conducted trials to test their new herbicide. When they sold the patented product, they included instructions based, they said uon that research. After the patent expired, the defendants sold a similar product with similar instructions. The plaintiffs claimed copyright infringement. The defendants said they were entitled to use the information provided they did not copy the words.
Buckley LJ: ‘As I understand the law in this case, the defendants were fully entitled to make use of any information of a technical or any other kind, which was available to them in the public domain, for the purpose of compiling their label and their trade literature, and they were not entitled to copy the plaintiffs’ label or trade literature thereby making use of the plaintiffs’ skill and judgment and saving themselves the trouble, and very possibly the cost, of assembling their own information, either from their own researches or from sources available in documents in the public domain and thereby making their own selection of material to put into that literature and producing their own label and trade literature’.
Goff and Buckley LJJ
[1979] FSR 46
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Baigent and Another v The Random House Group Ltd (The Da Vinci Code) ChD 7-Apr-2006
The claimants alleged infringement of copyright by the defendant publishers and author in the plot and otherwise in the book ‘The Da Vinci Code’. They said that their own work had been copied substantially, using themes and copying language. The . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Intellectual Property
Updated: 22 January 2022; Ref: scu.240139