Global Yellow Pages Ltd v Promedia Directories Pte Ltd
Judge | George Wei JC (as he then was) |
Judgment Date | 28 January 2016 |
Neutral Citation | [2016] SGHC 9 |
Court | High Court (Singapore) |
Year | 2016 |
Hearing Date | 17 October 2014,08 October 2014,30 October 2014,20 October 2014,28 October 2014,16 October 2014,27 October 2014,21 October 2014,30 September 2014,22 October 2014,10 October 2014,01 October 2014,02 October 2014,24 October 2014,29 October 2014,19 December 2014,13 October 2014,15 October 2014,14 October 2014,03 October 2014,07 April 2015,09 October 2014,07 October 2014,29 September 2014,23 October 2014,31 October 2014 |
Docket Number | Suit No 913 of 2009 |
Citation | [2016] SGHC 9 |
Subject Matter | Defences,Authorship,Compilations,Copyright,Subject matter,Groundless threat,Infringement |
Published date | 27 April 2017 |
Plaintiff Counsel | Bryan Manaf Ghows and Wang Yingyu (Via Law Corporation) |
Defendant Counsel | G Radakrishnan and Mark Teng (Infinitus Law Corporation) |
The plaintiff and defendant both produce telephone directories. The plaintiff alleges that the defendant infringed its copyright by, amongst other things, copying and referencing the listings and classifications in its directories. The central issue in this suit is whether plaintiff’s directories are protected by copyright, and if so, what the scope of that protection is.
This engages a question on which the foundations of copyright law rest: what does originality within s 27 of the Copyright Act (Cap 63, 2006 Rev Ed) (“the Copyright Act”) entail? Originality is the defining characteristic of works entitled to copyright protection under the Copyright Act. Other key concepts in copyright law, such as authorship, copying and substantiality, orbit around and take shape from the assessed originality of the work in question.
Telephone directories, in particular, occupy a special place in this debate. They cast in sharp relief the dichotomy between facts and expression, a dichotomy which is said to lie at the heart of the requirement of originality. Similar cases have been encountered by courts all over the world and each jurisdiction has formulated varying responses to what is in essence the same problem: what subject matter does the law of copyright protect? Copyright is a property right conferring rights
Whilst the plaintiff submits that the factual matrix of the suit is not complicated,
Much of the evidence comprised a detailed examination of the business process by which the plaintiff and defendant produced their competing works. Whilst this was necessary to determine questions of fact relevant to originality, subsistence of copyright and copying,
This judgment is structured under the following main headings:
The plaintiff, Global Yellow Pages Limited, publishes telephone directories in Singapore. It alleges that the defendant, Promedia Directories Pte Ltd, infringed its copyright in the 2003/2004, 2004/2005, 2005/2006, 2006/2007, 2007/2008, 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 editions of its three printed directories—the Business Listings, the Yellow Pages Business and the Yellow Pages Consumer—as well as its online directory, the Internet Yellow Pages.
The Business Listings is a white pages directory in which listings of businesses are sorted alphabetically. The Yellow Pages Business and Yellow Pages Consumer, which are targeted at businesses and consumers respectively, are classified directories that contain listings arranged within various classifications. The three printed directories were each previously known by different names (the White Pages, the Yellow Pages Commercial & Industrial Guide and the Yellow Pages Buying Guide respectively), but that is immaterial and I shall refer to them by their names at the time this suit was commenced. The plaintiff’s online directory is maintained at the URL http://www.yellowpages.com.sg. It is built around a search engine containing an online database.
The plaintiff claims, broadly, that copyright subsists in three categories of works:
The plaintiff alleges that its copyright was infringed by directories produced or maintained by the defendant.
The plaintiff says the infringement is evinced by two circumstances. First, the “substantial similarities” between the listings in the defendant’s directories and those in the plaintiff’s directories.
As to the former, the listings or enhanced data would only have been available to the defendant through the copying of “the whole of the [p]laintiff’s [w]orks or alternatively all the listings contained under each and every of the classification heading[s]”, which were identified in various annexures appended to the amended statement of claim.
As to the latter, the large number of seeds found in the defendant’s directories is proof of the defendant’s wholesale copying of the plaintiff’s directories, or in the alternative, copying of all the listings under each of certain classification headings.
The defendant’s position is a tooth-and-nail denial of each of the elements of the plaintiff’s pleaded claims. The defendant contends that copyright does not subsist in the plaintiff’s directories, the enhanced data or the seeds, either in whole or in part. The compilations do not amount to intellectual creations because the selection and arrangement is “commonplace and ... a matter of course”; it is “mechanical” and “not done by human authors but computers”.
The defendant also denies copying. It has published The Green Book since 1980 and has built up its own database of listings since then.
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