Walter v Lane
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''Walter v Lane''
900 __NOTOC__ Year 900 ( CM) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Abbasid Caliphate * Spring – Forces under the Transoxianian emir Isma'il ibn Ahmad are ...
AC 539, was a judgement of the
House of Lords The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by appointment, heredity or official function. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminst ...
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 c. 45) was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom, which received the Royal Assent on 1 July 1842 and was repealed in 1911.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 ...
. It has come to be recognised as a seminal case on the notion of
originality Originality is the aspect of created or invented works that distinguish them from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or substantially derivative works. The modern idea of originality is according to some scholars tied to Romanticism, by a notion t ...
in
copyright law A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
and has been upheld as an early example of the
sweat of the brow Sweat of the brow is an intellectual property law doctrine that is chiefly related to copyright law. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. ...
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'' ( ...
'' newspaper took down shorthand notes of a series of speeches given by the
Earl of Rosebery Earl of Rosebery is a title in the Peerage of Scotland created in 1703 for Archibald Primrose, 1st Viscount of Rosebery, with remainder to his issue male and female successively. Its name comes from Roseberry Topping, a hill near Archibald's wif ...
, 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 reportsinvolved 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 ''Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd'' was a House of Lords case in English defamation law concerning qualified privilege for publication of defamatory statements in the public interest. The case provided the Reynolds defence, which could be rais ...
'': 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