Walter v. Lane [1900] AC 539, (House of Lords) — a precedent in the Commonwealth countries that recognized fixation could be a determining factor in copyright determinations.
Facts
A speech is given in public by a politician. A newspaper hires skilled shorthand note-takers to record it, and publishes the speech. Some time later, another book publisher prints a collection of the politician's speeches. The newspaper sues the book publisher.
Result
Copyright is held by reporters who put politician's speech in material form.
Reasoning
The note-takers were skilled participants placing the work in material form, the politician was not involved in the case and the court awarded the copyright to the newspaper.
Lane & Jones, which the Court is slated to hear this fall.
Lane had to crawl up the stairs to defend himself against criminal charges because the courthouse lacked an elevator, and the state refused to conduct the proceedings in an alternate accessible location.
Lane would never have become a case if the courthouse, 30 years after requirements under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 were in law, had been addressed, and accessibility to the built environment provided," wrote Walter Parks, a longtime California activist.
The court of chancery restrained the publication of the catalogue, holding that property in mechanical works, or works of art, does certainly subsist, and is invaded, before publication, not only by copying but by description or catalogue.
The most marked and certain progress has been in the application of the law of copyright to the periodical press, in order to protect within reasonable limits the labour and expenditure of newspapers that obtain for the public the earliest news and arrange it for publication.
The courts of chancery and of appeal decided against the plaintiffs, on the ground that a reproduction of a painting must be by a painting or something cognate; but in an action for infringement, though the view already given was confirmed, the plaintiffs succeeded so far as the backgrounds to the grouping were concerned.
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