The plaintiff’s employee wrote computer software for use with telecommunications equipment. The defendant’s employee had set the specification of the software, reported errors and bugs, made suggestions as to the cause of some faults and had provided technical information about the hardware with which the software had to work. The defendant claimed joint authorship of the source code.
Held: Although the contributions made by the defendant’s employee had been extensive and technically sophisticated, had taken a lot of time and were very valuable, they did not constitute contributions to the authoring of the source code. The defendant was not a joint author. A claim to joint authorship of a copyright work is dependent upon the skills used being of an authorship type; computer programme testing was not in this case sufficient, nor that there had been an agreed division of labour, and no part was taken by the claimant in the writing process.
Laddie J
Times 18-Feb-1998, [1998] EWHC Patents 340
Bailii
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Robin Ray v Classic FM Plc PatC 18-Mar-1998
Contractor and Client Copyrights
The plaintiff had contributed a design for a system of classifying and selecting tracks to be played on a radio station. He did so under a consultancy contract.
Held: A Joint authorship claim required that the contributor had made some direct . .
Cited – Kogan v Martin and Others CA 9-Oct-2019
Dispute over the authorship of the screenplay of a film.
Held: ‘the judgment cannot stand. The judge has adopted an erroneous approach to the evidence, failed to make important findings of primary fact, failed to take account of material . .
Cited – Martin and Another v Kogan and Others IPEC 22-Nov-2017
The parties disputed whether joint authorship of the screenplay for a film, ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’. The claimant now sought a declaration of sole authorship of film screenplay, and the defendant cross-claimed for a declaration of joint . .
These lists may be incomplete.
Updated: 14 June 2021; Ref: scu.163066
