YPG suing second rival

YPG Group's bite appears to be as strong as its bark.

It is vigorously pursuing a second rival, an Australian company, in the High Court.

The YPG Group is fighting a case against defendants Yellowbook.com.au, its head of advertising and marketing David Khoury and database user Robert Coles under the Copyright Act, Fair Trading Act and Trade Marks Act.

A judgment on this case was delivered by Justice Mark Cooper on May 31 but publication is being withheld until some details are sorted between the parties, the Auckland Registry said.

In a separate but related case last month the High Court heard submissions about an Internal Affairs Department raid against a marketing database company for alleged copyright violations.

In that case, Yellow Pages and its subsidiary, Finda, accuse defendants Image Marketing Group (IMG) and its director Brendan Battles of stealing its phonebook databases which it is alleged to have on-sold in its products. Yellow Pages managed to obtain a temporary injunction at an earlier hearing.

Battles arrived from the US five years ago, and has been labelled the Spam King for sending out up to 50 million messages a day.

Of importance to both cases is a ruling handed down in the Australian Federal Court earlier this year that there is no copyright on the White Pages or Yellow Pages produced by Sensis, Telstra's directory business.

It has been argued in the case against IMG that the databases cannot be held to comply under the Copyright Act as, among other issues, there is no defined author and there existed a questionable degree of originality and skill relating to the content.

Here YPG Group contends it is entitled to enforce its rights against anyone infringing on its intellectual property.

New Zealand lawyer Guy Burgess, on his blog Law and Technology, says the Australian courts appear to have moved away from the sweat of the brow-type (where time, energy, thought and effort have been employed) arguments favoured in Britain.

"The clear and forceful Australian judgments will surely be influential on the Court's ruling  assuming the Telstra case is not overturned. It is being appealed," Burgess says.

"It is quite possible that by year's end New Zealand will be on the road to adopting the more tightly focused copyright law that has found favour in Australia.

"However, it will likely require at least one appeal to the Court of Appeal (and ideally another appeal to the Supreme Court) to set an authoritative precedent."

- © Fairfax NZ News