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 Balance wrote:

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

 Balance wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
£750 an hour?!! I'm in the wrong job.

Admittedly, this hourly wage is also used to cover the salaries of any staff the lawyer retains, pay rent/utilities/misc. expenses for offices, and any other expenses. Also, of course, downtime. Lawyers are paid well, likely overpaid, but not as much as it often seems.

Most expert witnesses are professors or other professionals and do not employ staff in that manner. All their day to day expenses are covered, any research gets done by graduate students if it goes beyond their own time. The expert witness fees are for the most part gravy on top of their regular job...pay for that trip to Tahiti on their Christmas Holiday.

Sorry, I was skimming again and thought the 750 was a lawyer's hourly rate, not an expert witness.

Even for a lawyer, $1,144.00 per hour is very, very high.

I cannot possibly countenance why GW would have paid that man so much, and GW is flat out blessed that the issues have been decided pre-trial. An expert on the stand testifying to having been paid more than $1,000.00 per hour next to experts that are receiving much more modest compensation can, and has, torpedoed cases.

Out of curiosity, is Chapterhouse allowed to bring up the GW witness's compensation in court, even if he's not on the stand?

Iirc their compensation is an allowed question when on the stand in trial, yes.

weeble1000 wrote:

 Balance wrote:

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

 Balance wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
£750 an hour?!! I'm in the wrong job.

Admittedly, this hourly wage is also used to cover the salaries of any staff the lawyer retains, pay rent/utilities/misc. expenses for offices, and any other expenses. Also, of course, downtime. Lawyers are paid well, likely overpaid, but not as much as it often seems.

Most expert witnesses are professors or other professionals and do not employ staff in that manner. All their day to day expenses are covered, any research gets done by graduate students if it goes beyond their own time. The expert witness fees are for the most part gravy on top of their regular job...pay for that trip to Tahiti on their Christmas Holiday.

Sorry, I was skimming again and thought the 750 was a lawyer's hourly rate, not an expert witness.

Even for a lawyer, $1,144.00 per hour is very, very high.

I think the top paid UK lawyer bills out at about 1000 pounds an hour and the average hourly billing for a London partner is between 600-700 pounds.

This particular lawyer (Michael Bloch QC) is who lucasfilm hired over that stormtrooper armour issue. He's pretty freaking pricey.

czakk wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:

 Balance wrote:

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

 Balance wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
£750 an hour?!! I'm in the wrong job.

Admittedly, this hourly wage is also used to cover the salaries of any staff the lawyer retains, pay rent/utilities/misc. expenses for offices, and any other expenses. Also, of course, downtime. Lawyers are paid well, likely overpaid, but not as much as it often seems.

Most expert witnesses are professors or other professionals and do not employ staff in that manner. All their day to day expenses are covered, any research gets done by graduate students if it goes beyond their own time. The expert witness fees are for the most part gravy on top of their regular job...pay for that trip to Tahiti on their Christmas Holiday.

Sorry, I was skimming again and thought the 750 was a lawyer's hourly rate, not an expert witness.

Even for a lawyer, $1,144.00 per hour is very, very high.

I think the top paid UK lawyer bills out at about 1000 pounds an hour and the average hourly billing for a London partner is between 600-700 pounds.

This particular lawyer (Michael Bloch QC) is who lucasfilm hired over that stormtrooper armour issue. He's pretty freaking pricey.

Yea, well, why the hell hire they guy who lost a case incredibly germane to your business? That is, like, a BIG red flag. Even if it does not mean he is a bad lawyer, which it doesn't necessarily mean, it means he exposes you to having that court case dragged into your case. There's nothing like relevant precedent that supports your position in which the person you are arguing against was wrong!

Maybe Bloch was trying to have a go at fighting that decision...oh wait, no, his opinion in the CHS case had nothing to do with that. It only came up when CHS's rebuttal witness pulled up the Lucasfilm case. Man, wasn't that out of left field...

Seriously, it isn't even just a bad decision in hindsight. It was a bad decision at the time. My guess is that someone at GW was equating high fees with high quality, which do not always go hand in hand. "Well, he is going to charge us more than $1,000 an hour, so he must be the best!

That is corporate thinking. When it all goes pear shaped, you can say, "well I hired the best guy, so I did my job. He is the one who F'd it up, not me."

Well, he wasn't able to get the UKSC to overturn the trial or court of appeal on the sculpture aspect, he was able to get them to reverse the lower courts on the justiciability issue and abandon the Mozambique rule. Letting Lucasfilm go after Ainsworth for US copyright breaches in the UK, which blocks the sale of the stormtrooper stuff in the US.

He didn't lose the case, he took a losing set of facts and spun half of it into a victory, overturning a century or so of precedent in the process

weeble1000 wrote:

That is corporate thinking. When it all goes pear shaped, you can say, "well I hired the best guy, so I did my job. He is the one who F'd it up, not me."

Very true. Same goes with government, have you noticed that no matter what happens, nobody ever gets fired?

No matter the scandal, or the deaths, feth ups in the health of police services always seem to end in "well, it wasn't MY fault" and nobody is accountable. I guess thats why everything goes to gak in the world, people are more interested in covering their asses than getting the job done.

Still, works for us. With any luck GW will get crushed and the floodgates will open for competitors to start hocking their wares. It might even be a good thing for getting official GW products, because it might motivate them to release gak speedier if they know others will make and sell the models that they don't!

czakk wrote:
Well, he wasn't able to get the UKSC to overturn the trial or court of appeal on the sculpture aspect, he was able to get them to reverse the lower courts on the justiciability issue and abandon the Mozambique rule. Letting Lucasfilm go after Ainsworth for US copyright breaches in the UK, which blocks the sale of the stormtrooper stuff in the US.

He didn't lose the case, he took a losing set of facts and spun half of it into a victory, overturning a century or so of precedent in the process

+1 czakk. Thanks for the clarification. Alas, I am not actually a lawyer, and was not dialed in to those particularities of the facts, having little experience in both international law and UK law.

All in all, that decision does not seem to be something that I agree with, but it principally has to do with the disparity between US copyright law and UK copyright law, an issue that was also bubbling around in the CHS case. The US really needs to tighten up its copyright laws and bring in some sort of industrial design, and/or make/use exceptions. As it is, one could interpret US statute in similar ways, but how far does that get you? Not much.

People do not make accessories for work of art. That is the fundamental problem. You make accessories for functional products. US copyright code seems to be very bad at navigating the "toys" space, that is, products in which the value is the aesthetic, but which are ultimately utilitarian. It is hard as Hell to copyright clothing in the US because it is largely seen as functional, which I think it fine, because it is. But the line between functional and aesthetic cannot be drawn by the reason someone buys a product, but rather should be drawn on a more objective basis, such as how the product is manufactured and the use to which it is intended to be put.