NIPC Law

Authors Ben Sutherland   Beyond My Ken   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0 Source Wikimedia Commons     Jane Lambert Chancery Division (Mr Justice Zacaroli) Smith v Dryden and others [2021] EWHC 2277 (11 Aug 2021) This was a claim by Kelly-Marie Smith against Kesi Dryden and others for copyright infringement. The claimant wrote the words and music for a song called Can You Tell Me .  She claimed that copyright subsisted in those works and that those copyrights had been infringed by the performance, recording and publication of the song Waiting All Night.  The song had been written by James Newman and recorded by the band Rudimental .  The action came on for trial before Mr Justice Zacaroli between 20 and 26 July 2021. At para [86] of his judgment in Smith v Dryden and others [2021] EWHC 2277, the learned judge dismissed the claim. The judge referred to s.1 (1) and s.3 (1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 . He also cited para [33] of Judg...

In    John Kaldor Fabricmaker UK Ltd v Lee Ann Fashions Ltd [2014] EWHC 3779 (IPEC) (21 Nov 2014) which I discussed in  Is this a copy? John Kaldor Fabricmaker UK Ltd v Lee Ann Fashions Ltd   11 Dec 2014, His Honour Judge Hacon assessed the steps to be taken by the court when assessing an allegation of infringement of copyright. He considered them again in   Bodo Sperlein Ltd v Sabichi Ltd and Another [2015] EWHC 1242 (IPEC) (8 May 2015) at paragraph [33] of his judgment: "In the absence of direct evidence of copying, the first of the steps to which I referred is to consider whether the claimant has established a prima facie inference of copying by reason of similarities between the copyright work and the defendant's work. In many cases (this is one) any inference of copying will come in the first instance from a comparison between the defendant's work and a publicly available design in the alleged chain of copying." He added at pa...