Colin Birss

Sir Colin Ian Birss (born 1964, Thurso) is a judge of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.

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 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, assigned to the Chancery Division, and received the customary knighthood.

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.

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.

...
Wikipedia