Intellectual Property Law

Here at IMPACT, everyone's snowed under this week. As usual, the other IP/IT law blogs and sites out there are doing a good job and so there's lots of interesting stuff to read. Here's a brief selection.

Firstly, the public section of the Society of Computers & Law contains Laurence Eastham's take on the latest legal developments arising from ripping music CDs to computers. Eastham's view? "Skip the consultation - the world has already moved on and legalising this form of copying is a social necessity."

Secondly, Sarah at Naked Law has written about the latest legal story to hit FaceBook, which concerns the popular FaceBook game Scrabulous:

"Scrabulous which is apparently one of the ten most popular Facebook applications attracts more than 500,000 users a day to the social networking site and appears to make litte effort to distinguish itself from Scrabble. It even provides a link to the Wikipedia definition of Scrabble from its rules page.  It's perhaps little wonder, then, that Hasbro accuses the makers of "gross copyright and trademark infringement" of Hasbro's rights in Scrabble."

Finally, Laurence Kaye discusses Crowson Fabrics Ltd v. Rider and others. This is a case in which the Court held that the database right of a company had been infringed. This has taken many IP lawyers by surprise; in the aftermath of certain European Court of Justice judgements in 2004 the database right was thought to be a lame duck by most. Those judgements meant that the right only arose where there had been a substantial investment in the obtaining, verifying or presenting of the database content - a test that most database will fail to meet. Was this test applied by the Court in Crowson? This is something we're examining here and will write about in due course.