The UK High Court has granted summary judgment in a TV format copyright case.  The Claimant, Mr Meakin, claimed that he had submitted proposals for game show formats and that his copyright had been infringed by the BBC, in particular by the game show “Come and Have a Go…If You Think You Are Smart Enough.”  

In determining if Mr Meakin had a real chance of success, the Court looked at (i) derivation and (ii) reproduction of a substantial part.  Derivation involves examining the similarities between the alleged infringing work and the original copyright work.  The Court found that sufficient similarity between the two works was lacking.  The Court considered it important that “no more than very general similarities at a high level of abstraction” were evident and that any similarity which existed concerned matters commonly used by existing TV shows, such as the use of premium rate phone lines and splitting the initial show from the results show. Using similar reasoning, the Court found that there was no real chance of success in establishing that there was a reproduction of a substantial part (as is necessary to prove copyright infringement) of Mr Meakin’s work.  Accordingly, the Court granted the defendants summary judgment.

As there is no clear cut decision or legislation on the parameters of protection of a format, claims will continue to be decided on a case by case basis.  There is a view that the law does not recognise formats because copyright and intellectual property rights in general protect only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.  This is not correct; if a format has a sufficient level of consistency and detail, the copying of that format will infringe copyright and/or amount to passing off.