In the field of creative arts – that is, literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works – it is rare that reproduction is exact. More often than not, a claimant will find himself faced with the ‘concept copier’ – one who has not copied exactly, but has taken the general concept or ideas expressed within the copyright work.
Such cases raise the thorny question of the extent to which general concepts or ideas can be protected by copyright, and require a claimant to advance his claim with care. These days, one usually finds any reference to the idea/expression dichotomy accompanied by further reference to a quote from Lord Hailsham in LB Plastics [1979] (himself quoting from the late Professor Joad): “It all depends on what you mean by ideas.” Hence the principle that copyright protects the expression of ideas and not the ideas themselves is often difficult to apply in practice. Recent cases have highlighted the difficulties.
