EBC granted injunction against Lexis Nexis for infringement of copyright

Last month we had blogged about the interim injunction granted in favour of Eastern Book Company (EBC) restraining Thomson Reuters (including Westlaw and Indlaw) from infringing the copyright in their law report Supreme Court Cases (SCC). In a further development, EBC has now been granted an interim injunction against LexisNexis India (including LexisIndia) and Butterworths by an order dated 22 September 2012 issued by the District Judge of Lucknow.  

As with the previous order the court held based on an illustration submitted by the Plaintiffs, that the editorial notes of law books, journals, online journals of the Plaintiffs publishing SCC exactly matched the editorial notes of the Defendants online journals. On this basis the court held that a prima facie case had been established and granted an injunction to the Plaintiffs.

22 October has been set as the date for filing the written statement and framing issues.  The entire order is available here and the previous order against Westlaw is available here.

We would like to thank Sumeet Malik for bringing this order to our attention.