Bristol Ground School vs ProPilot court case outcome

[OneHundredAbove]

So who has seen this?
Interesting reading (the article is at the bottom of the page).
News | Bristol Groundschool (http://www.bristol.gs/news)
Regards

[fibod]

...that the costs and damages are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The normal warnings about payment in advance to training companies must especially apply to anyone thinking of signing up with ProPilot at the moment. Caveat emptor :sad:

[Greg2041]

Hmm. Not so sure about hundreds of thousands but I wouldn't want to pick up the bill for the costs. It will be interesting to see whether costs are awarded and by how much the business has been affected by using the images. Of course, it might end up going to the administrative court on appeal. Do keep us informed.:8

[Greg2041]

Synopsis of the case makes interesting reading.

"When is copyright infringement unacceptable but condoned? When there are implied contract terms.

Bristol Groundschool Ltd v Intelligent Data Capture Ltd and others [2014] EWHC 2145 (Ch), a 2 July 2014 decision of the Chancery Division, England and Wales, saw Richard Spearman QC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, address various issues concerning ownership of copyright and breach of contract in a dispute relating to aviation training materials. The decision is lengthy (228 paragraphs) and raises a dozen or so issues, which readers are invited to read at their leisure.

The background and decision run as follows: in short, Bristol Groundschool, a company that specialised in training commercial pilots, brought suit against Intelligent Data (actually against several corporate and individual defendants) who supplied training materials. The Deputy Judge held that, on a true construction of its agreement with Intelligent Data, Bristol Groundschool owned most of the copyright in the artwork included in the electronic training materials and that the corporate defendants had infringed those copyrights by reproducing the artwork for their own business purposes, two of the three individual defendants being liable as joint tortfeasors because they were responsible for the day-to-day operations of those companies. Intelligent Data was also liable for breach of contract by failing to provide technical support to students to whom Bristol Groundschool had supplied the training materials. On the contractual side of things, the Deputy Judge held that a reasonable period for giving notice to terminate this agreement would have been nine months, giving Bristol Groundschool enough time to make other arrangements. On this basis, Intelligent Data was in breach of contract by threatening not to fulfil its obligations under the agreement unless Bristol Groundschool agreed new terms.

The interesting bit of this ruling was that the defendants counterclaimed against Bristol Groundschool and its managing director for infringement of copyright, breach of confidence, circumventing copy protection, malicious falsehood, and conspiracy to injure by unlawful means. Said the judge, the agreement contained an implied duty of acting in good faith: it transpired that Bristol Groundschool had secretly downloaded Intelligent Data's materials to use on its own behalf. This was commercially unacceptable behaviour which constituted copyright infringement -- but, however reprehensible that may be, even when added to other contractual breaches perpetrated by Bristol Groundschool, that did not amount to repudiation of the contract. This was because there were extenuating circumstances -- including Bristol Groundschool's legitimate concerns about its own business, the fact that the downloading was essentially precautionary and the additional fact that the downloaded material was only used for limited purposes, causing minimal financial damage to Intelligent Data. Even if one or more of the breaches had been repudiatory, he concluded, that would not have given Intelligent Data a defence to the claim against it for breach of contract.

This feels to this blogger like the sort of set of facts that, in an ideal world, would be dealt with best by mediation: as it is, neither comes out of the litigation with a clean bill of health, and the six days of hearing suggest that this was not a ruling that came cheaply."

[GrahamCownie]

As the Managing Director of Slate-Ed, the company which owns the Padpilot brand and Propilot Ltd I think I had better chime in on this one.

Firstly thanks to Greg for pointing out that Bristol Groundshool does not emerge from this with a clean bill of health. Far from it.

Furthermore I should point out that the Judge has intimated that the damages likely to be payable to Bristol Groundschool are minimal and that the costs and stress involved in this case are disproportionate to the issues involved.

I couldn't agree more. For our part we have tried to settle this dispute from the outset and throughout with repeated offers of mediation and settlement.

Secondly, much of this case involved a contractual dispute between Bristol Groundschool and IDC Ltd. IDC Ltd used to be a trading partner of Bristol Groundschool but now supplies Slate-Ed Ltd with artwork. Slate-Ed Ltd is not involved in anyway in the dispute relating to IDC Ltd or the costs/damages arising out of it.

Slate-Ed Ltd will have to pay substantial court costs but these are all provisioned for. Similarly Slate-Ed Ltd will have to pay damages for copyright infringement, as will Bristol Groundschool. Again Slate-Ed Ltd is well provisioned to underwrite these. So, as far as we are concerned, it's business as usual.

Most important of all IDC Ltd succeeded in asserting its right to the vast library of 3D models which it created and then sold to us.

Despite taking copies of these models from our computer servers without us knowing, Bristol Groundschool will no longer be able to use them.

By contrast we will continue our programme to refine and enhance the graphics we produce from them and to add animations and videos based on them.

I hope this helps.

Graham Cownie

[Alex Whittingham]

I was not going to comment on this thread but I suppose it is inevitable that Mr Cownie should try and 'spin' the huge mess he is in. The law requires case reporting to be factual so I will confine myself to correcting the bigger untruths.

The judge has not intimated that damages payable to Bristol Groundschool will be minimal.
Bristol Groundschool has never used IDC's 3D models, and the judge has ruled that the 2D images created from the models and used in both Bristol and Propilot's material are our copyright (but see para 60 below for the full ruling)

The full ruling is in the public domain here (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2014/2145.html). Anyone who wants to can read the original. The hearing to award costs is next week.

[keith williams]

In para 60 of the report.

(i) BGS owns the copyright in 2D views of 3D models that were taken by IDC and supplied by IDC to BGS pursuant to the 2001 Agreement.

Does this mean that propilot must stop using their training material until they have removed and replaced all f the BGS owned illustrations?


In para 196 of the report.

(vii) While I am loathe to decide, even to the civil standard, and even following a full trial in which a decision was taken not to invoke a claim to privilege against self-incrimination, whether any crime has been committed, it seems to me that (a) on his own evidence, Mr Whittingham caused IDC's computer to perform functions with intent to secure access to at least some data (i.e. animations) that was, and that he knew to be, unauthorised, and (b) accordingly, all the elements of the offence under section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 are made out.

Is this likely to result in a criminal investigation?

[Alex Whittingham]

One can only speculate, Keith. I am sure Mr Cownie has been phoning the CPS several times a day.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Speed-reading the judgement, with a personal interest as somebody who has a little training in contract law, and also has written several aviation books that I'd rather not see copied without my permission - I can only conclude ":mad: what a mess, I really hope that I never end up in that sort of position myself".

As for the people posting above, who I'm sure under normal circumstances are exactly the sort of people I'd be very happy to do business with, the judgement says:-

Based on his demeanour and some of what emerged in evidence, Mr Whittingham was prepared to go to considerable lengths to further his interests and those of BGS. He also gave me the impression of having thought through his position to the point of taking notable care to give away as little as possible in his answers to cross-examination.

So far as concerns Mr Cownie, I consider that there is substance in Mr Hicks's submissions to the effect that (1) Mr Cownie's strong feelings about this dispute have at the very least clouded his recollection of events, and (2) it was a less than satisfactory feature of his evidence that in a number of instances it only emerged in cross-examination.

The Blog post copied by Greg2041 (hopefully with permission of the copyright holder :E) summed it up brilliantly I think...

This feels to this blogger like the sort of set of facts that, in an ideal world, would be dealt with best by mediation: as it is, neither comes out of the litigation with a clean bill of health, and the six days of hearing suggest that this was not a ruling that came cheaply.


An object lesson to all of us I think if we ever end up in this sort of position - swallow pride, either deal with it "man-to-man", or use a trustworthy arbitrator.

[keith williams]

In some ways this case is similar to the battle between PPSC and SFT which took place in 2000/2001. In both cases good friends fell out and became bad enemies.

For PPSC and SFT the resulting legal actions broke the backs of both companies and they both went out of business within a year. Hopefully this case will have a happier ending.

[mglepd]

Relayed from Graham Cownie who wished to respond to / correct factual inaccuracies in earlier posts: All my post have to be 'approved' by a moderator. The moderator has responded to me saying that I've had my right of reply and will not be able to make further comments on this thread. End of relay

[keith williams]

His name was Mike Longhurst.

Well it’s rarely possible to state exactly what set off a chain of events.

You might argue that if Mike had not died in 1999 the two companies would not have fallen out. If they had not fallen out they would not have broken up the trading partnership and SFT would not have needed to set up its own ground school. There would then have been no copyright arguments and no legal battles, no expensive legal costs and no loss of focus on the primary businesses.

In the current case if there had been no downturn in the world economy there would have been no downturn in the ATPL student numbers. There would then have been no need for IDC to demand a larger share of the profits. So there would be no need for the two companies to fall out and there would be no need for ……

[Treadstone1]

We are all doooomed....

[keith williams]

You are of course correct, we are all ultimately doomed.

Entropy will eventually prevail and everything will be reduced to a very cold, infinitely large cloud of emptiness. So if we are all pessimistic we won’t be disappointed.

But this thread is about something more immediate and slightly less apocalyptic.