Walter v. Lane [1900] AC 539, was a judgement of the House of Lords on the question of Authorship under the Literary Copyright Act 1842. It has come to be recognised as a seminal case on the notion of originality in copyright law.

Facts

Reporters from The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

 Newspaper took down shorthand notes of a series of speeches given by the Earl of Roseberry and later transcribed them, adding punctuation, corrections and revisions to reproduce verbatim the speeches. These were then published in The Times. The Respondent in the case published a book including these speeches, taken substantially from the reports of those speeches in The Times. The question for the court was whether the reporters of the speech could be considered "authors" under the terms of the Literary Copyright Act. The House of Lords, reversing the decision of the Court of Appeal considered that the reporters were authors.
The effort, Skill and time that spent was sufficient to make them original.

Reasoning

The court by a 4-1 majority reversed the decision of the court of appeal. For Lord Bramton it was crucial that "The preparation [of the reports] involved considerable intellectual skill and brain labour beyond the mere mechanical operation of writing"

Significance

Although the Literary Copyright Act 1842 did not contain a notion of "originality", the decision in Walter v Lane would later be treated as authority for the notion of "originality" within English Copyright law.