''Walter v Lane''
900AC 539, was a judgement of the
House of Lords
The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the Bicameralism, upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by Life peer, appointment, Hereditary peer, heredity or Lords Spiritual, official function. Like the ...
on the question of Authorship under the
Copyright Act 1842
The Copyright Act 1842 (5 & 6 Vict. c. 45) was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom, which received the Royal Assent on 1 July 1842 and was repealed in 1911. It revised and consolidated the copyright law of the United Kingdom.
It was one of t ...
. It has come to be recognised as a seminal case on the notion of
originality in
copyright law and has been upheld as an early example of the
sweat of the brow doctrine.
Facts
Reporters from ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' newspaper took down shorthand notes of a series of speeches given by the
Earl of Rosebery, a prominent politician, and later transcribed them, adding punctuation, corrections and revisions to reproduce verbatim the speeches. These were then published in ''The Times'', under the proprietorship of
Arthur Fraser Walter
Arthur Fraser Walter (12 September 1846 – 10 August 1910) was an English newspaper owner and publisher, chief proprietor of ''The Times'' from 1894 until 1908.
Early life
Born on 12 September 1846, Walter was the second son of John Walter ...
.
The respondent in the case,
John Lane, published a book called ''Appreciations and Addresses, Delivered by Lord Rosebery'' including these speeches, taken substantially from the reports of those speeches in ''The Times''. The question for the court was whether the reporters of the speech could be considered "authors" under the terms of the Copyright Act.
Reasoning
The House of Lords, by a 4-1 majority, reversed the decision of the Court of Appeal. The court held that the reporters were authors under the Copyright Act 1842. The effort, skill and time that spent was sufficient to make them original.
For Lord Brampton, it was crucial that the "preparation
f the reports
F, or f, is the sixth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphabet#Let ...
involved considerable intellectual skill and brain labour beyond the mere mechanical operation of writing".
Lord Robertson, dissenting, compared the reporters to phonographs and found that there was no authorship even though there was much skill required.
Significance
Although the Copyright Act 1842 did not contain a notion of "originality" (the word original did not appear until the enactment of the
Copyright Act 1911
The Copyright Act 1911, also known as the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (UK) which received Royal Assent on 16 December 1911. The act established copyright law in the UK and the British Empir ...
), the decision in ''Walter v Lane'' would later be treated as authority for the notion of "originality" within English copyright law.
[''Sawkins v Hyperion Records Ltd'' ]005
''005'' is a 1981 arcade game by Sega. They advertised it as the first of their RasterScan Convert-a-Game series, designed so that it could be changed into another game in minutes "at a substantial savings". It is one of the first examples of a ...
3 All ER 636 at 643.
See also
* ''
Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd'': court case involving ''The Times''
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Walter V Lane
House of Lords cases
1900 in case law
United Kingdom copyright case law
1900 in British law
The Times