Mars UK Ltd v Teknowledge Ltd (No.2)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 11 June 1999 |
| Date | 11 June 1999 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
Chancery Division.
Before Mr Justice Jacob
Copyright - claim for breach - test of whether public policy defence
The test for deciding whether there was a general public policy defence to a claim for breach of copyright was whether the court could be reasonably certain that no right-thinking member of society would quarrel with its validity.
The test for deciding whether an equitable obligation of confidence had been imposed on the recipient of information, was whether any reasonable man, standing in his shoes, would have realised it was being given to him in confidence.
Mr Justice Jacob so held in the Chancery Division, in giving judgment for the plaintiff, Mars UK Ltd, in its claim that the defendant, Teknowledge Ltd, had infringed its copyright and database rights in relation to its coin-receiving and coin-changing designs, while rejecting Mars' claim for damages for alleged breaches of confidence.
Mr Michael Silverleaf, QC and Mr Richard Arnold for Mars; Mr Mark Vanhegan for Teknowledge.
MR JUSTICE JACOB said Mars were leaders in the design and manufacture of coin-receiving and coin-changing machines. Nowadays, those worked by using sensors, consisting of coils, to measure the thickness, diameter, resistivity and inductance of inserted coins.
The coil-signals were compared with sets of data for valid coins, recorded in an electronic memory on a chip which might be a programmable read only memory (PROM) or an electronically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM). Only the latter could be re-programmed to contain new data.
The discrimination process involved the use of mathematical recipes, algorithms, combining the outputs of each sensor so as to distinguish a valid from an invalid coin. Minor variations in coins' thickness and alloy-content involved the need for each parameter to have a window of acceptability, the fixing of which involved much skill.
In 1990 Mars began to design a new discriminator, called "Cashflow", using EEPROM chips.
To reserve re-programming to itself, it developed a data layout, a serial communications protocol and an encryption system, confining the alteration of discriminators to authorised service companies to whom
they hired tools wherewith to access any relevant EEPROM. Teknowledge, having successfully deployed reverse engineering to update old PROMs, proceeded to reverse-engineer machines which used EEPROMs.
Mars responded by suing Teknowledge for infringement of Mars' copyright and database right in the coin set data, the discrimination...
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Bruce MacInnes v Hans Thomas Gross (First Defendant)
...on account of costs in a case with an approved costs budget, the days of the educated guesswork identified by Jacob J in Mars UK Limited v TeKnowledge Limited [1999] 2 Costs LR 44 are now gone. Instead the court can be confident that there is a figure for costs which, because it has already......
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...by way of an interim payment should not exceed the irreducible minimum which VF will recover on a detailed assessment: see Mars UK Ltd v Teknowledge Ltd [2000] FSR 138. When the total claimed is so high, I think it is appropriate to err on the side of caution even though I have ordered asse......
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The Duty of Confidence Revisited: The protection of confidential information
...by any relationship of trust and confidence that prohibits it: Estcourt v Estcourt Hop Essence Co (1874-75) LR 10 Ch App 276, 279. 101[2000] FSR 138. 2015 The Duty of Confidence Revisited 291 The resort to ‘common sense’ is unhelpful. The decision also does not sit comfortably with Lucasfil......