On 22 April 2009, the High Court of Australia handed down the decision of IceTV v Nine Network Australia [2009] HCA 14, in which IceTV was held not to have infringed Nine’s copyright in its weekly schedule of programmes, when it used data from them to populate its electronic programme guides for use on digital televisions. It was an eagerly awaited decision, as it was expected to clarify the extent of the monopoly that copyright holders have over their compilations of factual data, an issue of importance in our data-driven economy.
Background
Nine executives create a “Weekly Schedule” for each week, showing the order of programmes on each day (amongst other things), and these schedules are sent to the “Aggregators”, who produce television guides for use by the public. IceTV makes an electronic programme guide called IceGuide, but unlike the Aggregators, they have no licence from Nine to do so. Instead, to create their IceGuide, an IceTV employee watched lots of television to create templates for each station (possible because television programming tend to be regular and predictable), and week by week variations would then be corrected by reference to the public Aggregated Guides. IceTV took time and title information from the Aggregated Guides, as there would have been no other way that they could have found these out before the shows actually screened.
Recent Comments