Last but not least the Plaintiff answered questions put to him by members of the public and it is
his answers which were merged together by the third-party excluding the questions and that
merger of his answers forms the subject matter of the suit as the ring tones complained about.
In conclusion the Plaintiff is not the author of the works and therefore not being the author he
does not enjoy copyright protection under the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, 2006.
Furthermore I agree with the submissions of the Defendant's Counsel as well as that of the Third
Party's Counsel on this point.
I further want to emphasise the authorities cited by the Third Party's Counsel on the pertinent
question of whether verbal utterances made with the knowledge that they are likely to be
broadcast, and made to members of the public can enjoy copyright.
In the case of Gould Estate versus Stoddart Publishing Company (1996 8209 (ONSC) the
Supreme Court of Ontario, Canada held that generally that conversation elicited in an interview
was not a literary work because it was not expressed in a material form. Secondly a person's oral
statements in his speech, interview or conversation are not recognised in that form as a literary
creation capable of attracting copyright protection. In that case the brief facts are that a young
concert pianist Mr. Gould was interviewed by Jock Carroll for an article in the Weekend
Magazine. The interviewer accompanied the young pianist on a vacation to the Bahamas and
took approximately 400 photographs and copious notes including some tape recordings of their
conversations. Certain of the photographs and comments were used in the magazine article and
nearly 40 years later in 1995 Jock Carroll published through Stoddart Publishing Company Ltd a
book entitled "Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young man". By this time Gould
had died and the estate brought the action against the publishing company. The court considered
the right of excluding publicity through the tort of appropriation of personality. The estate of the
deceased submitted that the book in question was a compilation of the photographs and act of
selling the book was to take commercial exploitation and therefore unlawful appropriation of the
personality of the deceased. The second ground of the action was grounded in copyright law in
Canada which is a creature of statute. The statute namely the Copyright Act provides that:
"Copyright shall subsist in Canada in every original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic
work". The authority is persuasive on the question of the use of tape recordings and photographs.
A judgement of the Supreme Court by Lederman J at page 8 of the supplied authority agreed
with and also quoted from a decision of the United States courts in Falwell versus Penthouse
International Ltd, 215 U.S.P.Q 975 (Vir. Dist. Ct. 1981) (this case was also supplied) which case
considered the interview of Rev Jerry Falwell published in the Penthouse magazine without his
consent after an interview. The publication contained his name and picture and a claim was made
for common law copyright infringement where it was held:
“Plaintiffs claim of copyright presupposes that every utterance he makes is a valuable
property right. If this were true, the courts would be inundated with claims from
Decision of Hon. Mr. Justice Christopher Madrama
Izama *^*~?+:
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