Copyright
Case Note: Glen Gould Estate v. Stoddart
Publishing Co. Ltd.
John Lambert
June
1998,
Last updated
24 March 2006
This case first
appeared on the Lancaster Buildings website
In The Estate of Glenn Gould v Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd. [1997] 4 EIPR D-99 the personal representatives of the pianist Glenn Gould tried to suppress a book that they had not authorized and for which they were not paid which was based largely on a journalist's interview notes. One of their arguments was that the deceased was the author of those notes and that the copyrights subsisting in those notes belonged to the estate. The defendant applied to dismiss the action. Granting the application, the court followed Walter and others v Lane [1900] AC 539, where the House of Lords held that copyright subsisted in a verbatim report of a politician's speech which had been transcribed and edited by a newspaper reporter and that such copyright belonged to the publisher.
The plaintiffs appealed unsuccessfully to the Court of Appeal on grounds inter alia that the defendant was exploiting the artistic genius of another at no cost to himself. Disposing of that argument at paragraph [28] Finlayson JA said:
"This misdescribes the legal
issues. We are not concerned about Gould's musical or artistic works but
with Carroll's literary and artistic work. The book of portraits is
Carroll's creation, not Gould's. He was, and now his heirs are the
owners of this literary and artistic creation and it is his estate that
is entitled to protection from the appellants who contributed nothing to
the book. Not only did the appellants not create the book, they were
incapable of doing so. Carroll had the photographs, the tapes and his
notes of his interviews with Gould. He was the only person who could
have reached back in his memory and recreated the scenes where he first
met Gould. The results are captivating. The book provides a compelling
insight into the character of a musical genius. In protecting Carroll's
artistic creation, the law permits the public to benefit from an insight
into Gould's early years to which it would otherwise be denied."
As the right to reproduce notes of conversations is now regulated by s.58 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the importance of this case to English readers is that it illustrates how copyright protects value added. In this case the value added lay not in the subject's utterances but in the selection, arrangement and editing.
