INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY • SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT • COMPETITION
SOFTWARE AND THE INTERNET
Chambers undertakes a wide variety of work specific to these areas.
Our technical experience and expertise
A number of members have spent time as programmers, designers of commercial software and managers of technical software development and bring that direct experience to bear in disputes in the field.
Programming languages in which members of chambers have experience as programmers and/or in the course of litigation include (with some illustrative cases): VAX and Visual Basic, COBOL, C, C++, Fox Pro, Fortran, Z80 Assembler (in Philips v. Salton), Java, Ruby, Various 4GLs, XML (in Merck v. Dawkins), SQL (in London and Quadrant v. Comino) and HTML.
Networking and other protocols of which members of chambers have experience include TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP (in E-Data v. Corbis).
Other relevant technical fields in which members of chambers have experience are:
Web application servers and frameworks such as Apache Tomcat and PHP (in Weider Publishing v. Highbury House);
Hardware interfaces such as graphics accelerators (in Time Group v. IBM) and PCMCIA (in Bromcom v. Samsung).
Software copyright disputes
Members of chambers have been involved in numerous disputes about infringement of copyright in a wide variety of types of software, and in diverse functional fields. Well known cases include Cantor Fitzgerald v. Tradition, one of the largest software copyright trials to date in the UK, in which members of chambers were instructed for all three parties. A recent reported case is Nova Productions v. Mazooma Games, which concerned among other things the types of copyright protection available to video games.
Members of chambers also have in-depth expertise in drafting, obtaining and advising on the execution of full Anton Piller (search) order and more limited without notice "disclosure forthwith" (sometimes known as "doorstep Piller" orders) in cases involving computers. These usually need to be obtained very rapidly. Often, co-ordination is needed with forensic computer specialists so that the terms of the order tie in with essential forensic evidence gathering steps such as hard-disk imaging. Members of chambers have the necessary expertise to draft these complex orders rapidly, and to explain to the judge the practicalities and the reasons why certain steps need to be taken. Recent cases within chambers in this area have included protecting the vital trading software of a major financial institution against copying, in a case involving disclosure forthwith orders and hard-disk imaging of laptops.
The Internet
Chambers has been involved in disputes relating particularly to the internet since its earliest days. A key field of work has been domain name disputes; members of chambers have acted in many of the passing off and trade mark infringement disputes concerning internet domain names and "cyber squatters", from BT v. One In A Million. Members of chambers have also undertaken cases concerning www.halifax.co.uk, www.whsmith.com, www.euronext.co.uk, www.citigroup.co.uk, www.ritz-casino.com and bbci.co.uk. A recent sample reported case is Global Project Management v. Citigroup.
In addition, members of chambers have experience of the Nominet and ICANN dispute resolution procedures.
Members of chambers have also been involved in cases addressing the application of wider or more general areas of the law to the new and unique demands of the internet. Examples include:
Totalise v. Motley Fool, a case concerning Norwich Pharmacal relief relating to the identity of a poster on an internet forum.
Reed Executive v. Reed Business Group (Court of Appeal), the leading case on visible and "invisible" use of trade marks on the internet, where leading counsel for the successful appellant was within chambers. Cases in that area require a good grasp of the technical operation of the internet including such things as HTML metadata and the intricacies of search engine optimisation, as well as a good knowledge of the developing law of trade marks in this area.
Quads4Kids v. Campbell in which the Claimants obtained injunctions to prevent the abuse of eBay’s VeRO programme by making spurious complaints of design right infringement so as to stop competitors trading.