(Published in the collection of judgments of the Criminal Circuit of the Supreme Court and the principles derived therefrom for the period 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2020, Twentieth Judicial Year, Technical Office, Supreme Court, Supreme Judicial Council, pp. 804-810.)
Introduction
This commentary addresses a judgment dealing with a delicate issue in intellectual property protection (the "Judgment"): the protection of an academic thesis and the postgraduate student's right of attribution under copyright and related rights. The Judgment raises a fine question arising from the overlap between that thesis and a separate research project.
Summary of the Dispute
As narrated in the Judgment, the Public Prosecution referred two defendants for wilfully infringing protected copyright: they published in a journal part of the victim's doctoral thesis — including the discovery and innovation it reached (the "Publication") — after she had defended her thesis, without attributing the Publication to her or indicating that it was drawn from her thesis.
The Judgment's reasoning further shows that the doctoral thesis coincided with a research project funded by a research institution (the "Research Project"), in which the victim had been engaged as a research assistant. On that basis, the courts of first instance and appeal held that the defendants' publication was permissible under the rules of the Research Project, and acquitted them of violating Article (52/2), read with Articles (2(c)) and (5(b)), of the Copyright and Related Rights Law (the "Law") under which they had been referred.
The Public Prosecution appealed to the Supreme Court, alleging on several grounds that the contested judgment misapplied the law, was flawed in its inference, and was deficient in its reasoning; one such ground was what the Prosecution regarded as conflating the victim's doctoral thesis, as a protected work, with the Research Project.
[For legal team review: the original commentary was published on the previous website as an image of its first page only — please complete the remainder (the grounds of appeal, the Supreme Court's findings, and the commentary) from Mr. Ahmed bin Hilal Al Abri's original file.]