unnecessarily broad to assert the validity of the proposition that there cannot
be copyright in a plot. What is clear from section 2 of the Copyright Act 2005
is that “ideas, concepts, procedures, methods or other things of a similar
nature” cannot be the subject of copyright protection. This section needs to
be interpreted for the purposes of this case. Does the “summary of the plot”
(quoted above) come within the exclusionary notion of an idea or concept or
is it a reproduction of an expressed idea?
Section 2 presents difficulties of interpretation relating principally to the level
of generality of the ideas intended to be within its ambit. In this connection, it
has been argued that though the orthodox view is that copyright can only be
in the expression or form of ideas, rather than in the ideas themselves, a
particular pattern or sequence of detailed ideas can be regarded as an
expression of those ideas, such that any copying of the pattern can constitute
an infringement of copyright. The following passage from Laddie, Prescott
and Vitoria, The Modern Law of Copyright and Designs, 2nd Edition
(Butterworths, 1995) pp. 61-2 illustrates this argument:
“2.75 A moment’s thought will reveal that the maxim is obscure or, in
its broadest sense, suspect. For example, in the case of a book the ideas
it contains are necessarily expressed in words. Hence, if it were really
true that the copyright is confined to the form of expression, one would
expect to find that anyone was at liberty to borrow the contents of the
book provided he took care not to employ the same or similar
language. This is not so, of course. Thus, it is an infringement of the
copyright to make a version of a novel in which the story or action is
conveyed wholly by pictures; or to turn it into a play, although not a
line of dialogue is similar to any sentence in the book.
Again, a
translation of a work into another language can be an infringement;
15