''Walter v Lane''
900AC 539, was a judgement of the
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the lower house, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. One of the oldest ext ...
on the question of Authorship under the
Copyright Act 1842
The Copyright Act 1842The citation of this Act by this short title was authorised by the Short Titles Act 1896, section 1 and the first schedule. Due to the repeal of those provisions it is now authorised by section 19(2) of the Interpretation Ac ...
. 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 ...
in
copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal 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, e ...
and has been upheld as an early example of the
sweat of the brow
Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is not require ...
doctrine.
Facts
Reporters from ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...
'' 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 w ...
, 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.
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 (1 & 2 Geo. 5. c. 46), also known as the Imperial Copyright Act 1911, was an Act of Parliament (UK), act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (UK) which received royal assent on 16 December 1911. The act established Copy ...
), 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'' 0053 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