Case: A-One Accessory Imports Pty Ltd v Off Road Imports Pty Ltd (1996) 34 IPR 306
Outcome: cited
The judgment of Drummond J in A-One Accessory Imports Pty Ltd v Off Road Imports Pty Ltd (1996) 34 IPR 306 at 316 is particularly helpful. The applicant claimed to be the copyright owner in the literary work that was its motorcycle parts catalogue, as updated from time to time. It alleged that the respondents had infringed its copyright by producing the respondents' 1993 parts catalogue. A major issue in the case was whether the applicant's catalogue was the product of copying other catalogues, with the result, so the respondents argued, that the applicant's catalogue was not the subject of copyright. Drummond J rejected this argument. His Honour observed (at 316) that "the question is whether the compilation, looked at as an entity, is original: it is not proper to dissect the work into its parts, and by determining that the individual parts lack originality, to deny originality to the whole work". He concluded that the original version of the applicant's catalogue infringed the copyright in an earlier work. His Honour went on to say, however, that: But, in my opinion, the fact that the 1986 A-One catalogue may be an infringement of the copyright in the 1984 Phoenix catalogue does not prevent A-One having copyright in its own 1986 catalogue. I do not read Ladbroke (Football) Ltd ... as limiting the proposition that, so far as compilations that consist of or include existing material are concerned, originality for the purposes of copyright can be found in the work of selection, to compilations consisting only of material that is not the subject of copyright. In that case, Lord Pearce, in the course of dealing with the question whether the defendants had infringed the plaintiff's copyright in their football coupon by reproducing a substantial part of it, said, at 293: The reproduction of a part which by itself has not originality will not normally be a substantial part of the copyright and therefore will not be protected. For that which would not attract copyright except by reason of its collocation will, when robbed of that collocation, not be a substantial part of the copyright and therefore the courts will not hold its reproduction to be an infringement. It is this, I think, which is meant by one or two judicial observations that 'there is no copyright' in some unoriginal part of a whole that is copyright. They afford no justification, in my view, for holding that one starts the inquiry as to whether copyright exists by dissecting the compilation into component parts instead of starting it by regarding the compilation as a whole and seeing whether the whole has copyright. It is when one is debating whether the part reproduced is substantial that one considers the pirated portion on its own. Although Lord Pearce was dealing with the question of infringement where the copyright work was composed of non-original and original material, his Lordship, in the latter part of this statement, in my opinion, clearly accepted that copyright can exist in a compilation even though the compilation consists of partly pirated material and partly non-pirated material. This would seem to follow logically from what the House of Lords had to say in Ladbroke (Football) Ltd to the effect that, so far as compilations of existing material are concerned, originality sufficient to attract copyright in a compilation can be found entirely in the work of selecting the material to be included in the compilation, as opposed to the work of reducing those selections to written form. 54 As I have already found, copyright in the works in suit rests with the applicants. Dallas Gibson and RMC uploaded the works in suit onto the Icarus College website as part of their own course materials for their own students. These infringing copies are deemed, by virtue of s 116 of the Copyright Act , to be the property of the copyright owners, being the Boyapatis: see A-One Accessory Imports Pty Ltd v Off Road Imports Pty Ltd (1996) 34 IPR 332. A notice on the Icarus College website stated that it was the owner of the copyright in the materials published on the website. When the respondents made the works in suit available to their students via the Icarus College website, they treated the infringing copies as their own and acted in a manner inconsistent with the applicants' rights as deemed owners and, accordingly, converted them: see Caxton Publishing Co Ltd v Sutherland Publishing Co Ltd [1939] AC 178 at 189 per Lord Russell of Killowen and 202 per Lord Porter..