Blow up: Claim against BBC ends in civil restraint order

Image from Copilot (prompt in image description)

Many large businesses face claims brought by unrepresented parties (known as ‘litigants in person’ or ‘LiPs’ in the UK, or pro se litigants in the USA). Many of those LiPs understandably struggle to elucidate their claims, or to refrain from Blunderbuss litigation where they articulate a large number of perceived wrongs, hoping that something will hit its target. While regrettable that so many people are unable to obtain professional legal advice, the courts are mercifully well accustomed to dealing with LiPs, and are generally very accommodating to them. There is a tension, however, between being accommodating, and allowing expensive and often ill-founded litigation to continue. The courts navigate this tension through case management and, where necessary, striking out claims. 

The claim

The Claimant argued that she had come up with a format for a TV show, sent that idea (or ‘treatment’) to the BBC, and that the BBC had passed the treatment to a production company (the second defendant, Wall to Wall Media Ltd), with Wall to Wall and the BBC going on to create a show (“Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star”) based on the treatment. She filed trade marks for the words “glow up: britain’s next make-up star”, but those trade marks were cancelled following earlier trade mark registry proceedings. She nevertheless claimed those marks were infringed. 

For good measure, she accused an employee of the BBC of having hacked her computer and deleted evidence of wrongdoing and accused the defendants of having harassed her by engaging in, among other things, the trade mark registry proceedings and refusing to pay her for her work. Despite various attempts to contact the Claimant, she did not attend the hearing. 

Given the usual readership of this blog, I will not go into the non-IP claims (harassment and computer misuse/hacking) in detail. It suffices to say they were struck out as the claim did not disclose a reasonable basis for bringing the claim. 

The trade mark claim was also struck out as the mark had been cancelled, a step which takes effect ab initio, i.e. it is treated as never having been registered. (I wondered if the claimant was using the words ‘trade mark’ to mean copyright in the name; news publishers regularly mix up the two.) 

As to the other IP claims, the judge considered that the Claimant had not set out her claim sufficiently and struck it/them out. While some guesswork could be made as to what The Claimant was trying to claim, the pleading itself was insufficiently clear. 

While a strike out of the claim is usually enough, the court went on to consider whether summary judgment should also be granted. This is interesting as the court could have just stopped at strike out, and seemed to want to draw a line under the case. 

The court proceeded on the basis that the treatment was alleged to be a literary or dramatic work. This is despite the Claimant having in the past denied that her claim was in copyright. 

The judge then went through a very in-depth exercise to establish whether there was an arguable claim for copyright infringement, including going through various features of the Claimant’s treatment and corresponding elements of the BBC’s show, finding that any such a claim had no reasonable prospects of success. 

A particularly draconian power of the court is to prevent claimants from bringing further claims, known as a ‘civil restraint order’ or ‘CRO’. The court considered the various types of CRO that it has the power to make, and decided that there were grounds to make a ‘limited CRO’, restricting her from making any further applications in the proceedings without first obtaining the court’s permission (subject to any application to vary the order or appeal). The court took particular note of the Claimant’s “propensity to make unspecified or poorly specified allegations of dishonest conduct against staff of the Defendants and their lawyers, and of bias against staff of the IPO and the staff of the court”.

I would not read too much into the failure of the claim from a legal standpoint; the claimant was unrepresented and did not attend the hearing, and her case was difficult to decipher. The bigger points to takeaway are:

1. LiPs, and especially those in the creative industries, often believe very strongly that a wrong has been done to them. They sometimes see themselves in a David vs Goliath fight.

2. The courts will often be very accommodating for LiPs, especially in cases concerning IP, which is a complex field. 

3. Parties should not, though, be forced to go through long-running and expensive litigation that is obviously without merit. The courts will entertain applications to strike out claims, albeit usually only after a LiP has had a chance to amend their claim to set it out properly.