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This is the shopping list we're going to go through. We're going to it's going to get increasingly, perhaps more technical.

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The next stop will be copyright. Now, copyright is not something that's going to be important to everybody.

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But it's important to certain types of business. If you're in the publishing business, it's obviously absolutely essential if you're producing books.

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But. It can also be important to people who design computer software.

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The case very recently, whether somebody copied the source code within a company and gave it to a competitor that was a copyright infringement.

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And computer programs, at least in source code since, are intended to be read by human beings or protected as literary works.

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So if you're in the software industry, copyright is quite important to you.

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It's also important to a lot of other businesses like drama, etc. plays, films, broadcasts, music, the music business.

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Copyright is absolutely essential for the music business.

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We know the trouble that's going on, the moment that downloading, etc. more practical problem, the legal problem.

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But the music business wouldn't have a business unless they were able protect the music and sound recordings by copyright.

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Thing to notice about copyright is it doesn't give you a monopoly.

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It doesn't stop people selling the same thing, making or selling the same thing.

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If you're clever enough to write some music which is identical to a very successful piece of music,

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and you do it quite independently, that's not a copyright infringement.

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It'd be very unlikely that that has happened, but in theory it's correct.

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So copyright protects copying. It also only protects original works, which means that it's the result of your individual effort.

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You haven't copied it from somebody else.

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The plus side of copyright as it lasts a very long time indeed, I think can last up to 70 years from the date the author dies.

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And in some cases, you know, I mean, think about Harry Potter.

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Harry Potter is probably going to be in copyright until the next century.

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Now what copyright doesn't protect? Know, ideas.

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Now, to give you one example, Sherlock Holmes. If you had an idea about writing, about stories, about a detective who had a particular appearance,

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well, certain clothes, a hat, a pipe, etc., etc., just an idea.

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But the actual text of those stories would be protected by copyright.

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That copyright has expired in the UK.

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But so at the moment, you anybody can copy Sherlock Holmes stories and sell them if they want to.

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One word of warning is that what happens in the UK may not be typical of everywhere because some of the works

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and the are still protected in the United States because they have a longer period of copyright protection.

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What doesn't? Well, copyright isn't terribly good at protecting designs.

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It will protect drawings, artistic works.

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An artistic works. This purpose could be an engineering drawing. It could be the design of a machine.

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But it only protects the drawing from in the sense that you can't make another drawing from it.

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It will not stop people using that drawing to make three dimensional articles.

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So if you've got a business which makes mechanical devices and you have engineering drawings which you need for the manufacture of those products,

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you're not going to be able to stop somebody making those products by copying yours.

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That's not an infringement of copyright. You can stop them copying your drawings.

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If they manage to get hold of the drawings and copy those, you will be able to stop that.

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But basically, copyright is not terribly good protecting designs for products.

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It's not terribly useful. What is more useful?

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It's the system of design rights. And this is so become so complicated.

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I don't think we really can go into it very deeply today and just indicate generally sort of protections available.

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You can have registered rights, which means you have to apply to the patent office to register a design of a product, whatever.

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And here is some of the requirements. It's got to be novel.

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It hasn't hasn't been done before. And it will give you a monopoly rights which will be able to stop anybody producing a similar product.

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But this doesn't apply to to products where they have a where the design is functional,

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where the features of the design perform some practical purpose.

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But if you've got some design freedom and can in some way maybe have the same function but express it in a different way, it might.

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Protect that sort of expression. And one could imagine a simple article like a a a water jug.

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It has a functional purpose, but there are lots of different ways of designing that to make it attractive.

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And those different ways might well be register as a design.

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But you can't design. You can't register a functional aspect of a water jug.

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Functional articles do have some very limited protection under unregistered design rights.

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These lasts for a shorter period of time, basically up to 15 years or ten years if you started to market it at an earlier stage.

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They're not going to be terribly useful in your business, but they might just give you a little bit of protection to start with.

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Perhaps I can just give you an example of a real problem.

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Now the. These are vacuum cleaners.

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The vacuum cleaner on the right is called Henry and is very popular.

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Cleaners who working at night in offices find Henry very consoling.

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It's looked upon as a little person, and it's a very, very popular type of vacuum cleaner.

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Now. More recently, Henry had competition.

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There was a newcomer, and we see it on the left. Now it doesn't have the Henry has the name of his manufacturer on the top pneumatic.

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The competition has no name. And it doesn't have Henry's face.

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Well, what can you do about that? Well, you might say, well, what about design protection?

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The no doubt features of Henri, which aren't dictated by the function, unfortunately, or design protection that Henry had expired.

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Nothing can be done. However, there was evidence the people who went into shops to buy Henrys were sometimes rather careless.

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And they could easily come out with a product on the left.

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So the law of passing off, which we looked at earlier, making misrepresentations,

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enabled Henry Henry's manufacturers to stop the sale of the vacuum cleaner on the left.

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So you have to be a bit imaginative sometimes.

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You probably got to go through tick the boxes. Copyright design rights patents will come to attend the end.

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It may be something as simple as as a saying, well, people are being deceived.

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This is very like the Jeff Lemmon case. So the people on the left have gone away to make a new product.

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So. But you don't really want to be relying on that if you could help it.