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Law Notes Intellectual Property Law Notes

Introduction To Copyright Law Notes

Updated Introduction To Copyright Law Notes

Intellectual Property Law Notes

Intellectual Property Law

Approximately 1014 pages

IP law notes fully updated for recent exams at Oxford and Cambridge. These notes cover all the LLB Intellectual Property law cases and so are perfect for anyone doing an LLB in the UK or a great supplement for those doing LLBs abroad, whether that be in Ireland, Hong Kong or Malaysia (University of London).

These were the best IP Law notes the director of Oxbridge Notes (an Oxford law graduate) could find after combing through dozens of LLB samples from outstanding law students with the highes...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Intellectual Property Law Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Copyright Law

*PQ Structure:

  1. Is this a type of qualifying material which is capable of being protected by copyright?

    1. A protected work?

    2. Material form?

    3. Originality?

  2. Was the work created by a qualifying person?

  3. Who owns the copyright and what is its duration?

  4. Have the owner’s rights been infringed by D performing a restricted act?

  5. Permitted acts and defences?

  6. Remedies?

______________________________________________________________________________________________

‘Copyright’: Describes the area of IP law that regulates the creation and use that is made of a range of cultural goods, such as books, songs, films and computer programs. Copyright is an unregistered right, meaning that protection arises automatically without having to satisfy any formalities. Mandated by Article 5(2) of the Berne Convention. Makes it easier and less expensive to acquire and maintain copyright protection than other IPRs.

Separation of copyright and physical ownership - Although copyright is a property right, it is limited in time. Ownership of a physical copy of a copyright work does NOT imply ownership of the copyright itself; so I cannot make copies. E.g. You cannot publish letters sent to you.

Idea-Expression dichotomy – Copyright does not exist in the ideas themselves, but only in the forms they are expressed in.

TRIPS Art 9(2): ‘Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such’.

United States Copyright Act 1976: ‘In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in the work.’

UK embodies the principle through common law:

  • Jeffery’s v. Boosey (1855); + Erle J: ‘the claim is not to ideas but to the order of words, and this order has a marked identity and a permanent endurance...the order of each man’s words is as singular as his countenance, and although if two authors composed originally with the same order of words, each would have a property therein, still the probability of such an occurrence is less than there should be two countenances that could not be discriminated’.

  • *Nova v. Mazooma Games [2007]; N had CR in a computer game simulating games of pool. Trial judge said he could see there was similar features of the game but not substantial copying. Ideas are not protected. TRIPS lays down positive rule that copyright protection does not extend to ideas. Nova had simply been inspired. It had emulated but did not copy any programme code so was legitimate.

  • *SAS Institute Inc v. World Programming Ltd [2010];

Facts: SAS is major player in business analytics software market. WPL saw market opening for alternative software which would be able to execute application programmes written in the SAS language so WPL creating a product to do that. WPL emulated functionality of SAS components as closely as possible, so tried to ensure that the same inputs would produce the same outputs, so its users would get same performance on the SAS or WPL system. No suggestion that WPL has access to source codes, or that WPL copied text or structural designs of the source code. Was it copyright infringement or clever business practice?

Decision: Following Nova, J Arnold found that replicating functionality did not infringe copyright; but some of the manuals did infringe. Asks Court of Justice questions about boundaries: Whether programming languages, interfaces and functions are protected by copyright? Raised issues surrounding boundary between ideas and expressions.

  • *Elanco v. Mandops [1979];

Facts: Instructions on a can of weed killer. C had invented and patented a weed killer sold with a leaflet. When patent expired D began to sell weed killer with a leaflet similar to C’s. D brought out 2 further versions of the leaflet, not so similar in detail, but conveying the same data. Date was publically available.

Decision: CA granted an injunction. Lord Goff thought that revising away from a deliberate copy is not enough. If D had gone to the publically available scientific sources of info and produced...

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