Ashfords team celebrate after scooping a 'lovely bubbly' award

Exeter's Ashfords’ IP disputes team has been declared the winner of an Impact Case of the Year award at the recent Managing IP Awards 2023, for their work in the case of Shazam Productions Limited v Only Fools The Dining Experience Limited and Others.

The annual industry awards ceremony (the equivalent of the Oscars for IP lawyers) was held at the Hilton London Metropole.

As one of the leading events of the legal calendar, the 18th annual Managing IP Awards recognised leading IP specialist law firms and their clients from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Trophies were presented to in-house teams, law firms, individuals and corporations behind the most innovative and challenging intellectual property work of the past year.

Ashfords successfully represented Shazam, the owner of the copyright in the scripts for the award winning television sitcom Only Fools and Horses. The legal proceedings were brought to prevent the continued performance of an unlicensed interactive dining show, called ‘Only Fools The (cushty) Dining Experience’.

The show featured characters taken from the sitcom and their catchphrases, jokes, wants, desires and backstories, but presented in the context of an interactive pub quiz which never appeared in the sitcom.

As the Deputy Judge hearing the case said, the dining show “amounted in substance to the creation of a new episode of [the sitcom]”.

The Deputy Judge also found, amongst other things, that the dining show infringed Shazam’s copyrights and its marketing and name was contrary to the law of passing-off.  He also found that the show was not ‘fair dealing’ with Shazam’s copyrights, for the purposes of parody or pastiche. 

Of even greater significance, he held that Del Boy, the famous fictional character in Only Fools and Horses, is a separate copyright work, independent of the scripts for the series. This was the first time that the courts in this country have recognised that a fictional character can be an independent copyright work.

Carl Steele, Partner, Head of IP at Ashfords and in charge of the legal team representing Shazam, said: “The decision has major implications for those who wish to use fictional characters and who, in the past, might not have sought the copyright owner’s permission to do so. 

“For the first time ever an English court has held that a fictional character (in this case, Del Boy) is a separate, protected copyright work from the stories in which they feature. That's a big deal in the entertainment world, as noted in an editorial piece published in The Times national newspaper.”