NIPC Law

Mungo Jerry live at Zürisee-Festival in Switzerland 2013, Erlenbach Author Harald Bischoff Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Source: Wikipedia IPEC (His Honour Judge Hacon)  Editions Musicales Alpha S.A.R.L. v Universal Music Publishing Ltd and Others [2017] EWHC 1058 (IPEC) (10 May 2017) This case, which came before His Honour Judge Hacon on 23 Feb 2017, shows how copyright comes into being, how it is assigned and how much care should be taken when drawing up agreements for its assignment, particularly when settling disputes over ownership. The story began in 1966 when Jacques Dutronc  recorded a song entitled  Et moi, et moi, et moi   which reached number 2 in the French charts. Dutronc had composed the music while Jacques Lanzmann wrote the words. Because Britain and France were and remain parties to the Berne Convention , copyright subsisted automatically in those works in the Uni...

First published 28 May 2005 Some years ago I was consulted by a small pottery that had received a letter from the legal advisors to a much larger pottery complaining of infringement of copyright in the designs of one of their product ranges. My solicitors showed me samples of the complainant’s products. The back of each item bore words stating that the product was a genuine 18th  century design. The letter of response that I settled for my clients alluded to that stamp.  I never heard anything more about that case. It may well be that my draft did the trick and threw the complainant’s advisors off the scent. Equally, it may be that the complainant replied that the response was missing the point, that sufficient artistic work had been done in the late 20th  century to reset the 18th  design to constitute a separate copyright and that my clients prudently acknowledged the point. Whatever happened, it highlighted one of the more interesting questions of copyright law, namely what is the r...