Belief that copyright permission has been granted is no defence to infringement of copyright if no valid permission was, in fact, given. This was the finding in the Patents County Court case Hoffman v Drug Abuse Resistance Education (UK) Ltd (DARE) (Neutral Citation Number: [2012] EWPCC 2). The case concerned photographs copied from a Government sponsored website and used without permission.
Even though DARE had employed a web designer firm to produce their website this did not mean that they avoided liability. This case has significance for all FE and HE institutions that use images on their websites and who employ web designers to create websites for them.
The web designer firm employed by DARE had found the Government's Talk to FRANK website and understood the content on it (which included Mr Hoffman's photographs) was covered by Crown copyright and therefore could be used. DARE considered that it had been misled since that has turned out not to be the case. However DARE was held to have committed acts restricted by copyright, specifically the act of communicating the work to the public, and thereby infringed Mr Hoffman's copyright.
This case is important for FE and HE institutions also because it provides some insight into how damages are likely to be calculated in cases involving copyright infringement online, particularly images.
The court decided that the right sum by way of damages is the sum which a willing photographer in Mr Hoffman's position and a willing user in the defendant's position would have agreed upon as a charge for using the photographs on the websites. Taking into account the number of photographs and the length of the period of the infringement when the photographs were on the website the judge decided that the right sum for damages in the particular case was £10,000.
The
full text of the judgment can be found on the BAILII website.