Won important court case!

In the late 90s, TONO members Helge Skarveland and Stene Osmundsen wrote a fairy tale "Labb og Line på eventyr" with songs, lyrics and music. The fairy tale was a commissioned work that was to be released on CD and used by the individual banks in Sparebank 1 Gruppen (the Bank). The agreement that was entered into in 1999 was to be valid for 2 years and secure the Bank an exclusive right to use the text and music for a fee, while it was clear that the copyright to the intellectual property would belong to the composer and lyricist. The CDs were also produced and released on the authors' own record company Skarv AS, which owned the production rights to the release.

Two years later, in December 2001, Helge Skarveland discovered that the Bank had divided the story into 24 parts and posted the entire adventure online in connection with their Christmas calendar. This had to be considered a breach of the agreement, as this only included CD release, but since Skarveland had intentions of extending the agreement with the Bank for continued use, he failed to react then and there.

However, it turned out that the Bank had no plans to continue the collaboration with the authors of the fairy tale, as they believed that they could post all the content from the CD for free online without paying the authors anything extra for this. The Bank had a remaining print run of the CD itself and had no plans to print more, when they could easily post the fairy tale on the banks' websites instead.

Skarveland and Osmundsen sent letters to the Bank but received no response. As performing musicians, composers and producers, the authors had very busy days at the time and were therefore only able to take action against the Bank in 2004, when they were assigned a lawyer to handle the case. Skarveland and Osmundsen's lawyer eventually made the Bank aware that the use of the CD's content on the Internet was unlawful, and that such exploitation required both a new agreement and remuneration for the use. The Bank, for its part, rejected all claims from the copyright holders.

The course of the court

In the end, the authors saw no other option but to go to court and file a lawsuit against the Bank to stop the unlawful use of their text and music online, as well as to claim compensation for the loss. The Oslo District Court ruled in the case on 16 November 2007 and concluded that the Bank had completely lost the case. The Bank was ordered to stop making the text and music available online, and was also ordered to pay compensation to the authors. In addition, the Bank also had to pay the legal costs for the copyright holders.

The ruling shows that even if one transfers a right to use intellectual property in a specific way, one as an author should not necessarily accept that the intellectual property is exploited in other ways or by other means than what was agreed between the parties. This principle is very important for TONO's copyright holders, who to a large extent create intellectual property that can be exploited in new media. The ruling is legally binding and thus an important victory for copyright on the internet. Read the full ruling.