The UK's Copyright Tribunal has published new rules which came into force on 6 April 2010 that govern the cases it hears. The rules are designed to streamline Tribunal cases with the ultimate aim of saving parties' legal costs. The Tribunal is part of the High Court and decides terms and conditions of licences offered by, or licensing schemes operated by, collective licensing bodies in the copyright and related rights area. The UK's Intellectual Property Office commissioned a report into the workings of the Tribunal in 2006, and its published findings included a recommendation that the Tribunal revises its procedural rules.

One of the Tribunal's new weapons in the Rules is its enhanced case management powers when dealing with the larger, complex, high profile cases that it hears such as the recent "downloads" case brought against the MCPS and PRS by the BPI, iTunes and mobile phone operators, and currently the case brought against the Newspaper Licensing Agency relating to indexing newspapers' online content. The larger cases require the Tribunal to analyse complicated market finances and how certain rights are exploited in those markets. Historically, the costs associated with that part of the case have been greatly increased by how evidence from expert witnesses has been deployed. The new Rules now give the Tribunal powers to control and curb the use of expert evidence, and to restrict the ability of the parties to recover those costs at the end of the case. This is expected to have a significant impact on how parties will put forward their cases because the Tribunal will now expect all evidence to be targeted to very specific issues in the case, and in fact the Tribunal will have the power to decide what those issues are at the outset.

While transition arrangements are in place for ongoing cases, any future applicants to the Tribunal will need to give careful thought in advance as to how they are going to structure their case in order to make the best use of the evidence they will be allowed to put before the Tribunal.

Louis Castellani