This is the shopping list we're going to go through. We're going to it's going to get increasingly, perhaps more technical.
The next stop will be copyright. Now, copyright is not something that's going to be important to everybody.
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.
But. It can also be important to people who design computer software.
The case very recently, whether somebody copied the source code within a company and gave it to a competitor that was a copyright infringement.
And computer programs, at least in source code since, are intended to be read by human beings or protected as literary works.
So if you're in the software industry, copyright is quite important to you.
It's also important to a lot of other businesses like drama, etc. plays, films, broadcasts, music, the music business.
Copyright is absolutely essential for the music business.
We know the trouble that's going on, the moment that downloading, etc. more practical problem, the legal problem.
But the music business wouldn't have a business unless they were able protect the music and sound recordings by copyright.
Thing to notice about copyright is it doesn't give you a monopoly.
It doesn't stop people selling the same thing, making or selling the same thing.
If you're clever enough to write some music which is identical to a very successful piece of music,
and you do it quite independently, that's not a copyright infringement.
It'd be very unlikely that that has happened, but in theory it's correct.
So copyright protects copying. It also only protects original works, which means that it's the result of your individual effort.
You haven't copied it from somebody else.
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.
And in some cases, you know, I mean, think about Harry Potter.
Harry Potter is probably going to be in copyright until the next century.
Now what copyright doesn't protect? Know, ideas.
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,
well, certain clothes, a hat, a pipe, etc., etc., just an idea.
But the actual text of those stories would be protected by copyright.
That copyright has expired in the UK.
But so at the moment, you anybody can copy Sherlock Holmes stories and sell them if they want to.
One word of warning is that what happens in the UK may not be typical of everywhere because some of the works
and the are still protected in the United States because they have a longer period of copyright protection.
What doesn't? Well, copyright isn't terribly good at protecting designs.
It will protect drawings, artistic works.
An artistic works. This purpose could be an engineering drawing. It could be the design of a machine.
But it only protects the drawing from in the sense that you can't make another drawing from it.
It will not stop people using that drawing to make three dimensional articles.
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,
you're not going to be able to stop somebody making those products by copying yours.
That's not an infringement of copyright. You can stop them copying your drawings.
If they manage to get hold of the drawings and copy those, you will be able to stop that.
But basically, copyright is not terribly good protecting designs for products.
It's not terribly useful. What is more useful?
It's the system of design rights. And this is so become so complicated.
I don't think we really can go into it very deeply today and just indicate generally sort of protections available.
You can have registered rights, which means you have to apply to the patent office to register a design of a product, whatever.
And here is some of the requirements. It's got to be novel.
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.
But this doesn't apply to to products where they have a where the design is functional,
where the features of the design perform some practical purpose.
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.
Protect that sort of expression. And one could imagine a simple article like a a a water jug.
It has a functional purpose, but there are lots of different ways of designing that to make it attractive.
And those different ways might well be register as a design.
But you can't design. You can't register a functional aspect of a water jug.
Functional articles do have some very limited protection under unregistered design rights.
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.
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.
Perhaps I can just give you an example of a real problem.
Now the. These are vacuum cleaners.
The vacuum cleaner on the right is called Henry and is very popular.
Cleaners who working at night in offices find Henry very consoling.
It's looked upon as a little person, and it's a very, very popular type of vacuum cleaner.
Now. More recently, Henry had competition.
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.
The competition has no name. And it doesn't have Henry's face.
Well, what can you do about that? Well, you might say, well, what about design protection?
The no doubt features of Henri, which aren't dictated by the function, unfortunately, or design protection that Henry had expired.
Nothing can be done. However, there was evidence the people who went into shops to buy Henrys were sometimes rather careless.
And they could easily come out with a product on the left.
So the law of passing off, which we looked at earlier, making misrepresentations,
enabled Henry Henry's manufacturers to stop the sale of the vacuum cleaner on the left.
So you have to be a bit imaginative sometimes.
You probably got to go through tick the boxes. Copyright design rights patents will come to attend the end.
It may be something as simple as as a saying, well, people are being deceived.
This is very like the Jeff Lemmon case. So the people on the left have gone away to make a new product.
So. But you don't really want to be relying on that if you could help it.