Fabric "Ticket Stamp" Protected As Both An Artistic And Literary Work

Abraham Moon & Sons Ltd v Thornber and others

Background

The claimant, Abraham Moon Limited, designed a fabric in 2004, which it called "Skye Sage", which had been sold as a furnishing fabric since 2005. It became one of their bestsellers. In 2010, the claimant discovered that a company called "Art of the Loom" was selling a furnishing fabric similar to theirs, called "Spring Meadow". The Spring Meadow fabric was available at John Lewis, one of the claimant's best customers and proceedings eventually followed¹.

The claimant's Sky Sage fabric is shown below on the left. The infringing Spring Meadow fabric is shown on the right.

The claimants alleged copyright infringement. Copyright was argued to subsist both in the fabric itself and in the "ticket stamp" used to make the fabric itself. A ticket stamp is essentially a piece of paper (in this instance comprising only two pages) containing words and numbers, which are used as the instructions to set up a loom