PAKISTAN / COPYRIGHT / COMPILATIONS

Compilations, Speeches, Wrappers and Assignments

Faisal K Daudpota

Copyright World, Issue 124, October 2002

In this article the author examines the most important copyright cases in Pakistan. He considers Abbas Husain Farooqui v Royal Printing Press et al, in which the issue before the Court was whether there subsisted any copyright in a desk diary containing notes, extracts and selections from various Acts and Ordinances ("the amount of originality would not be much, but even that small amount is protected by law"); Al-Iblgh Ltd v The Copyright Board Karachi, in which the Court concluded that, if a speech or lecture had been delivered in circumstances leading to communication to the public at large, the speaker would not have any copyright in such speech or lecture; Dakir India Ltd v Hilal Confectionery (Pvt) Ltd, in which the Court held that, since candy wrappers were protected under India's copyright laws, and since Pakistan's laws reflected the provisions of the Berne Convention, an Indian copyright owner could sue for copyright protection in a Pakistani Court; Yousuf Salim Chishti et al v Government of Punjab and Shakeel Adilzadah v Pakistan Television Corporation Ltd, in which the Court held that copyright assignments were valid only if expressed in writing; and Warner Brothers v Imtiaz et al, in which a criminal prosecution for copyright infringement (though "it could not be said to be groundless") failed for procedural and evidentiary reasons. The author concludes from these cases that the quality of being original has nothing to do with the literary or artistic merit of the work; that compilations are a subject of copyright because of their research and learning and are new works because they are the product of the authors' original labours, even though the contents may be old; that copyright may be assigned only by strict compliance with statutory procedures; that authors' rights under the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention are fully respected in Pakistan; and that criminal remedies are available in Pakistan for certain copyright infringements. [20078]