"For pig farmers, read potato farmers"

Thanks to Class 99er Jeremy for drawing our attention to Grimme v Scott, hot off the press today, a patent and UK Unregistered Design Right case on potato separators which separate spuds from "weeds, earth, clods, stones and haulm". Very agricultural.

On the design side of the case, the Claimants won a slightly pyrrhic victory, given that their rights were held to have expired in December 2008, on one out of three of the alleged infringements, and the defendant conceded that another had infringed, leaving one found not to infringe. The Defendant had admitted copying, so the design case revolved around similarity.

The Defendant raised a "threats" counterclaim under s253 of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act on the basis of threatening letters from the Claimant's lawyers to the Defendant's customers. Slightly surprisingly he succeeded, since the judge held that the wording of the letter implicitly applied to all three of the allegedly infringing rollers, whereas one had been found non-infringing, so that the threat was not justified.

Here is the Defendant's "Original" roller, held to infringe:

And their "Second" roller, which escaped infringement on the basis that the internal chambers and rib shapes were different:

The case makes no new law, but illustrates the extent to which UK Unregistered Design Right protects even the internal parts of even purely functional designs, subject to the exclusion of "must fit" and "must match" features. The judge drew on the analysis of the pig fender in C & H Engineering v. Klucznik [1992] FSR 421 - but for pig, read potato.