Before and After Designers Guild : Another Look at Appellate Deference in New Zealand's Copyright Law

This paper considers how Designers Guild has affected New Zealand’s copyright law, using as its springboard two decisions of the New Zealand Court of Appeal: one before and one shortly after the Supreme Court’s apparent endorsement of the approach to appellate deference that was adopted by the House of Lords. The paper argues that the special characteristics of New Zealand's copyright law — including the dominant use of copyright as a vehicle for protecting the designs of functional products — should provoke some further scrutiny of whether deference to trial courts' findings on the substantiality of copying continues to be appropriate.Forthcoming in: Transition and Coherence in Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge University Press 2020), Chapter 3