Conflict of laws - Information technology - Authorisation

(1) Football Dataco Ltd (2) Scottish Premier League Ltd (3) Scottish Football League (4) PA Sport UK LTD v (1) Sportradar GMBH (a ­company registered in Germany) (2) Sportradar AG (a company registered in Switzerland): Ch D (Mr Justice Floyd): 17 November 2010

In proceedings for infringement of copyright and database right brought by the claimant UK companies (F) against the defendant German and Swiss companies (S), the court was required to determine whether it had jurisdiction.

F were engaged in organising professional football matches in the UK, and creating and exploiting certain data and rights in relation thereto. S provided live scores, results and other statistics relating to football and other sports to its customers via the internet. The copyright and database right at issue in the proceedings was alleged to subsist in a database compiled by F which comprised UK football match statistics. F claimed that, in assembling their data, S were copying data from F’s database. It was necessary for F to show a good arguable case of copyright and/or database right infringement in the UK in order to establish jurisdiction in the UK. It was S’s case that they performed no infringing acts, or indeed any acts at all, in the UK. S argued that there could be no infringement unless there was a good arguable case that what they were alleged to have taken by reproduction was itself protectable as a copyright work, in the sense that it could be described as the author’s own intellectual creation – matters such as goals, goal scorers, and red and yellow cards left no room for judgement or discretion, they were simply collected mechanically by an observer.

Held: (1) F’s case was that the infringing act was the reproduction of its data by UK customers, and S’s authorisation of the act of reproduction by the customers. F had adequately pleaded a case of authorising reproduction by customers in the UK. Consequently, there was also an adequate plea of joint infringement between S and the UK customers (see paragraphs 28-41 of judgment).

(2) S’s argument that the part alleged to have been reproduced did not amount to an intellectual creation was not supported by any evidence. While there might ultimately prove to be force in S’s argument, F had a good arguable case on the issue of reproduction of a substantial part (paragraph 49).

(3) F had pleaded that S had extracted and/or re-utilised the whole or a substantial part of its database, within the meaning of regulation 16 of the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997. Unlike copyright, there did not appear to be any provision in relation to database right which corresponded to section 16(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which prevented ‘authorising’. F therefore had to show that S had done the acts in question, or plead some act of extraction or re-utilisation by someone else and rely on joint tortfeasorship. It was the end-users in the UK who would carry out any act of extraction in the UK, by downloading information necessary to allow S’s pop-up windows to appear on their screen. Despite the absence of a specific allegation to that effect in the relevant part of the particulars of claim, the particulars of claim viewed as a whole did allege sufficient facts for F to be able to maintain that customers had extracted the data in the UK. F had a good arguable case on the issue of extraction (paragraphs 52-62). The ‘re-utilisation’ issue raised a question of law, namely the place where ‘making available to the public all or a substantial part of the contents of a database by... online... transmission’ occurred, within the meaning of article 7(2)(b) of Directive 96/9. In the context of satellite broadcasts within the EU, the place where the act of broadcast occurred was where the signals were introduced under the control of the person making the broadcast into an uninterrupted chain of communication. That was known as the ‘emission theory’. There was no corresponding definition for either of the restricted acts in issue in the instant case. It was significant that the UK had adopted the emission theory for all wireless broadcasts, not solely satellite broadcasting. Article 7(2)(b) of Directive 96/9 and article 3 of Directive 2001/29 should be interpreted as meaning that the act of making available to the public by online transmission was committed and committed only in the place where the transmission took place. Although the placing of data on a server in one state could make the data available to the public of another state, that did not mean that the party who had made the data available had committed the act of making available by transmission in the state of reception (paragraphs 63-74).

(4) The particulars of claim alleged sufficient facts to make out a case of re-utilisation by the two named customers.

Applications granted in part.

James Mellor QC, Lindsay Lane (instructed by DLA Piper UK) for the claimants; Hugo Cuddigan (instructed by Bird & Bird) for the defendants.