Designers Guild Ltd v Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd

Ratio Decidendi

Facts

The claimant, Designers Guild, owned the copyright in a furnishing-fabric design called 'Ixia', which combined vertical painted stripes with scattered flowers and leaves in an impressionistic style. The defendant, Russell Williams, marketed a rival fabric ('Marguerite') with a strikingly similar combination of stripes and flowers. Designers Guild sued for copyright infringement. The trial judge found that the defendant had copied the design and that what was taken amounted to a substantial part; the Court of Appeal reversed him on substantiality, and the claimant appealed to the House of Lords.

Judgment Summary

The House of Lords restored the trial judge's finding of infringement, holding that the Court of Appeal had been wrong to interfere. Their Lordships confirmed two central points. First, copying may be inferred from a combination of proven access to the copyright work and similarities that are more readily explained by copying than by coincidence; the judge's finding of copying was a conclusion of fact with which an appellate court should not lightly interfere. Second, and crucially, the test for whether a 'substantial part' has been taken is qualitative, not quantitative: the question is whether the part copied represents a substantial part of the author's own skill, labour and judgement — the originality that attracted copyright — not what proportion it forms of either work. Lord Hoffmann and Lord Millett both stressed that where the copied features are themselves an expression of the artist's original skill and effort, taking them will be substantial even though they might be described at a high level of abstraction. The case remains the leading English authority both on inferring copying and on the qualitative substantiality test.

Key Quotes

Subsequent Treatment