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Pretty quickly
after the book was published the Ian Fleming Will Trust, through
their London lawyers, took great exception to our publishing, in
full, copies of a number of letters by Ian Fleming, to which the
Trust owned copyright. They really were not best pleased, and
notified us that we had infringed their copyright and were liable
for damages.
We, that’s the
publisher and I, claimed that we had every right to reproduce these
documents in the book without infringing copyright as they were used
as part of the prosecution case in the 1963 Ian Fleming plagiarism
trial. We also believed ourselves to be protected by law, since
section 45, subsection 2 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of
1988 states that it is not an infringement of copyright if the
publication of documents occurs within the context of reporting
legal proceedings, which clearly is the case with this book. In
addition, we felt we could rely on the fair dealing exception of
criticism and review as set out in section 30 of the act. We
wondered why the Fleming Will Trust believed these exemptions didn’t
apply in this case. |
