A comedian has lost a High Court claim against a production company founded by Steve Coogan over allegations of copying a sitcom.
Joshua Rinkoff, also known as Harry Deansway, claimed Baby Cow Productions infringed his copyright by using elements of his sitcom Shambles in its 2022 series Live At The Moth Club (LATMC).
Mr Rinkoff, who created, wrote and directed two series of Shambles which were released in 2013 and 2015, said producers working on LATMC “would have seen some or all” of his show and “obviously copied both the format and distinctive elements” of the sitcom.
Lawyers for Baby Cow Productions had denied copying and, in a judgment on Friday, Judge Amanda Michaels dismissed Mr Rinkoff’s case.
She said in the 30-page ruling that the format of Shambles was not “capable of being protected by copyright as a dramatic work”.
She also said: “The claimant accepted that the combination of characters and plotlines needed a level of repetition or repeatability carried over coherently from episode to episode in order to establish a protectable format.
“That does not seem to me to be the case with the pleaded features of Shambles – there is insufficient identification of the attributes of the principal characters and a complete absence of plotline.”
Judge Michaels also said there were no grounds to “draw an inference” that LATMC was copied from Shambles.
At a hearing in November, Tim Sampson, on behalf of Mr Rinkoff, said in written submissions that Shambles was “freely available” to watch online and had been “shared widely on social media by individuals connected to the comedy scene”, including producers and writers associated with LATMC.
Jonathan Hill, on behalf of Baby Cow Productions – which Coogan co-founded in the 1990s – said in written submissions that writers who were brought in to work on LATMC were “unaware of Shambles”.
He continued: “LATMC is a mockumentary, not a sitcom, and one of its key features is that it presents substantial passages of actual stand-up, which Shambles does not.”
