NIPC Law

Jane Lambert In  Judicial Review of the Copyright Exceptions: British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and Others v Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills   20 July 2015 I discussed the order by Mr Justice Green to quash The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies forPrivate Use) Regulations 2014  SI 2014 No 2361 in    British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors Musicians' Union and others, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Another (No 2) [2015] EWHC 2041 (Admin) (17 July 2015). A statement by the Intellectual Property Office on 20 July 2015 announced that HMG was considering the implications of the judgments and the available options. In the penultimate paragraph of my case note I wrote: "As Hargreaves has recommended that intellectual property policy should be evidence based it may be that applications of this kind will become more ...

British Library Photo Wikipedia One of the consequences of extending the term of copyright in many types of copyright has been a massive increase in the number of works in which copyright subsists whose owners cannot be identified or found. Such works are known as "orphan works" and HM government claims that there are some 91 million of them in the UK alone.  Because their owners cannot be traced orphan works cannot lawfully be reproduced even for preservation. Consequently, works recorded on such media as celluloid film and magnetic tape may be lost for ever.  Much of that work is culturally important and some of it is of considerable scientific interest such as patient records in studies of malaria.  In Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth   Professor Hargreaves described the problem of orphan works as "the starkest failure of the copyright framework to adapt." The Orphan Works Directive This is not of cour...

In 1962 Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed a floor lamp with a marble base and a curved lead to a bowl shaped reflector.  Those lamps, known as the Arco lamp and you can see a picture of one of those lamps in Achille Castiglioni's studio in Quick History: The Arco Lamp   in  Apartment Therapy. Original Arco lamps retail for £1,373 but it is possible to buy a reproduction for a fraction of that price as the Prime Minister's wife did recently (see "Samantha Cameron counts the cost of her repro lamp"   3 Oct 2011 The Guardian ) .   The reason why it is possible to buy a reproduction lamp is that s.52 (2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ( "the CDPA" )  provides that after the end of the period of 25 years from the end of the calendar year in which articles made from an original artistic work in which copyright subsists with the licence of the copyright owner are first marketed, that work may be copied by making articles of any ...