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Helena Marttila-Bridge

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Helena Marttila-Bridge is an associate in the technology and media group in the London office who joined the firm as a trainee solicitor in 2009.  Her practice focuses on intellectual property, data protection, and information technology law, and encompasses regulatory compliance and advisory work.

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By Jacqueline Clover and Helena Marttila-Bridge

On 5 February 2013, the English High Court handed down a judgment in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp & Ors v Harris & Ors [2013] EWHC 159 (Ch), according to which copyright owners have no proprietary rights to the money derived from infringement of their copyright.

The case involved an indexing website, Newzbin2, which made available to its users infringing copies of films and TV shows.  The claimants, who were owners or exclusive licensees of the copyright in those works, started copyright infringement proceedings against Newzbin2’s operator and companies alleged to have links to the website.  The claimants asked the High Court to grant proprietary injunctions over the proceeds that the defendants had derived from the copyright infringement.  The injunctions would have prevented the defendants from dealing in or disposing of the proceeds.
Continue Reading The English High Court Rules that a Copyright Infringer Is a Trespasser, Not a Thief

On 29 October 2012, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group published a report examining the Government’s role in promoting and protecting intellectual property (IP).  According to the report, which is based on the written submissions of almost 60 interested bodies, Government departments often fail to understand the importance of IP to the growth of UK’s economy. The report also criticizes the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) for having lost the confidence of a large number of its main stakeholders in its IP policy-making and recommends that greater ministerial leadership will be exercised over the IPO’s activities.  While the report welcomes the IPO’s increased investment in research, the Office is critiqued for failing to view IP as a property right and promoting the creation and development of new IP.
Continue Reading UK Government Urged to Champion Intellectual Property Rights

As first reported by Timothy B. Lee of Ars Technica, on October 10, 2012, a district court judge handed down a decision in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust.  Hathitrust is a long-running copyright infringement case concerning a shared digital repository based at the Univerity of Michigan.

The case is related to the actions brought against Google over the company’s Books Library project, on which we have reported here and here.  The Michigan university library together with a number of other universities formed a repository called the HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL), which contains digital copies of books scanned by Google as part of the Books Library project.  The HDL uses the files for three purposes: a full-text search, preservation, and access for disabled people who cannot read printed copies of the books.  The full-text search is a technology which allows users to search for particular terms across all the works stored in the HDL without revealing any in-copyright material.…

Continue Reading District Court Accepts Fair Use in Book Scanning Case