Monday, Jun 14, 2010
The Lawyers Weekly
Class action contends lawyers’ copyright infringed by commercial database
The latest issue of The Lawyers Weekly discusses SGM's latest class action lawsuit against Thomson Reuters for copyright infringement.
The class action contends that Thomson Reuter's Westlaw Litigator service infringes copyright by reproducing, and making available on-line for a fee, more than 50,000 pleadings, court motions and facta copied from civil court files across Canada. The lawyers whose documents are made available for purchase receive no compensation.
The plaintiff is Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman, who is represented by SGM's Louis Sokolov and Jordan Goldblatt.
The Lawyers Weekly states:
Sokolov acknowledges “anybody can go to the court file and get a copy of a document and use it as a basis for their research or work. That’s fair.”
But he argues “the difference of course is if you go to a court file and make a copy, the court isn’t making a profit off a lawyer’s work. The court is providing it as a public service. But it’s a material difference to take tens of thousands of documents and offer them for sale, on a bulk basis, without any compensation, or indeed any permission, from the people who wrote them.
“The nature of the copying, the nature of the publication, and the nature of the profit-making from it, puts it in a different category altogether, and we think that that’s what makes this matter actionable.”
Goldblatt adds “on top of that there is also the fact that the documents are transformed into a format where they can be downloaded, and directly copied from [via cut and paste, for example]. So it goes above and beyond research, to where it can be used as the very basis for another draft of the document.”
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