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Colin Birss

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Lord Justice Birss
Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom.svg
Lord Justice of Appeal
Assumed office
8 February 2021
MonarchsElizabeth II
Charles III
High Court Judge
Chancery Division
In office
13 May 2013 – 7 February 2021
Personal details
BornDecember 1964
Alma materDowning College, Cambridge

Sir Colin Ian Birss (born December 1964[1] in Thurso) is a judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales.

Career

Birss attended Largs Academy and then Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He graduated from Downing College, Cambridge in 1986 with a first class honours degree in metallurgy and materials sciences. Birss worked for Arthur Andersen until 1988 and after legal training at City University London he was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1990, joining Three New Square, a specialist intellectual property set of barristers' chambers.

Birss was made a Queen's Counsel in 2008. He was appointed a Specialist Circuit Judge on 5 October 2010 and assigned to the Patents County Court in 2010 and authorised to sit as a deputy High Court judge. On 13 May 2013, he was appointed a High Court judge,[2] assigned to the Chancery Division, and received the customary knighthood in the 2013 Special Honours.[3] He was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal on 8 February 2021.

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Largs Academy

Largs Academy

Largs Academy is a Scottish secondary school, opened in August 1970, serving the towns of Largs, Fairlie, Skelmorlie and the island of Cumbrae, as well as taking placement requests from across Scotland, from places such as West Kilbride, Beith and Renfrewshire. As of March 2017, Largs Academy was in the top 30 schools for Higher Results in Scotland, sitting at number 27.

Lancaster Royal Grammar School

Lancaster Royal Grammar School

Lancaster Royal Grammar School (LRGS) is a selective grammar school for boys aged 11–18 in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. Old students belong to The Old Lancastrians. The school's sixth form opened to girls in 2019. LRGS is also in the United Kingdom's thirty oldest schools.

Downing College, Cambridge

Downing College, Cambridge

Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge and currently has around 650 students. Founded in 1800, it was the only college to be added to Cambridge University between 1596 and 1869, and is often described as the oldest of the new colleges and the newest of the old. Downing College was formed "for the encouragement of the study of Law and Medicine and of the cognate subjects of Moral and Natural Science", and has developed a reputation amongst Cambridge colleges for Law and Medicine.

Arthur Andersen

Arthur Andersen

Arthur Andersen was an American accounting firm based in Chicago that provided auditing, tax advising, consulting and other professional services to large corporations. By 2001, it had become one of the world's largest multinational corporations and was one of the "Big Five" accounting firms. The firm collapsed by mid-2002, as details of its questionable accounting practices for energy company Enron and telecommunications company Worldcom were revealed amid the two high-profile bankruptcies. The scandals were a factor in the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Middle Temple

Middle Temple

The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn. It is located in the wider Temple area of London, near the Royal Courts of Justice, and within the City of London. As a liberty, it functions largely as an independent local government authority.

Barristers' chambers

Barristers' chambers

In law, a barrister's chambers or barristers' chambers are the rooms used by a barrister or a group of barristers. The singular refers to the use by a sole practitioner whereas the plural refers to a group of barristers who, while acting as sole practitioners, share costs and expenses for office overheads. The concept of barristers' chambers is commonly thought of as a law firm.

High Court judge (England and Wales)

High Court judge (England and Wales)

A Justice of the High Court, commonly known as a ‘High Court judge’, is a judge of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, and represents the third highest level of judge in the courts of England and Wales. High Court judges are referred to as puisne judges. High Court Judges wear red and black robes.

Knight Bachelor

Knight Bachelor

The title of Knight Bachelor is the basic rank granted to a man who has been knighted by the monarch but not inducted as a member of one of the organised orders of chivalry; it is a part of the British honours system. Knights Bachelor are the most ancient sort of British knight, but Knights Bachelor rank below knights of chivalric orders. A man who is knighted is formally addressed as "Sir [First Name] [Surname]" or "Sir [First Name]" and his wife as "Lady [Surname]".

2013 Special Honours

2013 Special Honours

The Special Honours are issued at the Queen's pleasure at any given time. The Special Honours refer the award of the Order of the Garter, Order of the Thistle, Order of Merit, Royal Victorian Order and the Order of St John.

Cases

In 2011 he sat on the controversial case brought by ACS Law on behalf of MediaCAT, relating to file downloading on peer-to-peer filesharing networks.[4]

In 2012 he ruled on Temple Island v New English Teas, a case where a photograph of an AEC Routemaster London bus crossing Westminster Bridge was found sufficiently similar to another photograph of the subject to constitute copyright infringement.

In July 2012, Birss, sitting in the High Court, ruled that Samsung did not infringe Apple's registered design right in its iPad tablet. The judgment mirrored the decision made earlier in the US by a jury. In October 2012 the Court of Appeal upheld the judgment, including the publicity order imposed on Apple because it was necessary to clear up uncertainty in the market place after Apple took legal action in Germany against Samsung. The order required Apple to publicise that it had lost the case on its website and in the media. The Court of Appeal said:

because this case (and parallel cases in other countries) has generated much publicity, it will avoid confusion to say what this case is about and not about. It is not about whether Samsung copied Apple's iPad. Infringement of a registered design does not involve any question of whether there was copying: the issue is simply whether the accused design is too close to the registered design according to the test laid down in the law.[5]

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Personal life

Birss lives with his wife and their three children at their family home in Hertfordshire. His recreations include beekeeping.

Source: "Colin Birss", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, January 6th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Birss.

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References
  1. ^ "Colin Ian BIRSS personal appointments - Find and update company information - GOV.UK". Companies House. UK Government. Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  2. ^ "No. 60505". The London Gazette. 15 May 2013. p. 9621.
  3. ^ List of Knights Bachelor, thegazette.co.uk; retrieved 5 September 2015.
  4. ^ Wakefield, Jane (25 January 2011). "Net piracy gets its day in court". BBC News. Retrieved 30 January 2011.
  5. ^ "Samsung Galaxy Tab 'does not copy Apple's iPad designs'". The Guardian. 18 October 2012. Retrieved 15 May 2013.


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