The English High Court: a pragmatic and effective forum for global rights holders

The English High Court has shown in two recent judgments (both in Hasbro Consumer Products Licensing Ltd & Anor v SConnect Co. Ltd & Ors 2026) that it can be a cost-effective and progressive forum for international rights holders to protect their assets against infringement.   Across these judgments, the High Court demonstrated that it is willing and able to:

1. determine complex issues at summary judgment stage where factual and expert evidence has been carefully prepared in support;
2. take a pragmatic approach to reviewing evidence, finding it appropriate to draw wider inferences from a sample set of evidence;
3. apply the Brownlie presumption where relevant foreign laws are similar to English laws; and
4. grant an international wide injunction

The facts:

Hasbro is the owner of the Peppa Pig franchise, which since its UK launch in 2004 has become a global multi-media phenomenon. SConnect is the Vietnamese owner of the “Wolfoo” animated series which has been broadcast on multiple platforms worldwide.  Hasbro claimed that audio used in the Wolfoo animations was wrongfully taken from Peppa Pig animations and therefore constituted an infringement of Hasbro’s copyright in the Peppa Pig audio. Hasbro claimed infringement across the UK, the European Union and numerous other territories worldwide. The High Court granted Hasbro summary judgment on a key aspect of its copyright infringement claim and subsequently a wide-ranging injunction over SConnect’s Wolfoo catalogue.

Summary judgment on sound recordings:

The first judgment concerned the Claimant’s application for summary judgment in relation to sound recording copyright. Although the application was made on a summary basis, the issues before the Court were highly technical. The Court was required to consider copyright subsistence in individual sound recordings, authorship, ownership and chain of title over many years of production, detailed expert spectrogram evidence said to establish indirect copying, and multi-jurisdictional copyright and private international law issues, including the application of the Brownlie presumption of similarity where relief was sought across numerous jurisdictions.

In granting summary judgment, the Court concluded that the Defendants had no real prospect of successfully defending the sound recording copyright claim. The judgment demonstrates the Court’s willingness to determine technically complex copyright issues summarily where the evidential record is sufficiently developed. It also contains what is likely to become an important discussion of the Brownlie presumption in an intellectual property context.

Copyright subsistence:

The judgment also provides detailed consideration of copyright subsistence, ownership and infringement in relation to sound recordings. In particular, it illustrates how carefully prepared factual and expert evidence can enable technically sophisticated copyright disputes to be resolved without the need for a full trial.

The Claimants produced numerous contracts spanning around 20 years, including with production companies, to evidence their claim to copyright. They also relied on detailed spectrographic evidence comparing the sound recordings relied upon with audio used in Wolfoo videos. That evidence was central to the Claimants’ case that copyright in Peppa Pig sound recordings had been infringed through indirect copying and communication to the public via the Wolfoo videos.

The Defendants did not instruct their own expert evidence to answer the Claimants’ expert analysis. The Court was therefore prepared to determine the sound recording copyright claim summarily, on the basis of the developed factual and expert evidence before it.

Applicable law

The applicable law question was significant because the Claimants sought relief across numerous jurisdictions. The Court accepted that the Brownlie presumption of similarity applied where the Defendants had not displaced the presumption that the relevant foreign laws were similar to English law. This aspect of the judgment is likely to be important in future international IP disputes where online infringement crosses borders at scale.

Scope of injunction

The second judgment, dealing with consequential relief, is particularly significant. The principal issue was the extent of the injunction. The findings of copyright infringement had been established by reference to a representative sample of Wolfoo videos, but the Claimants’ case was that the evidence demonstrated systematic infringement across the wider Wolfoo catalogue and that limiting relief to the representative sample would not adequately protect Hasbro’s IP rights.

The Court accepted that submission. It held that the representative sample was genuinely representative, that it would have been entirely disproportionate to analyse more than 30,000 videos individually, and that it was appropriate to draw wider inferences from the sample. On that basis, the Court granted an injunction extending to the entire Wolfoo catalogue requiring its removal, rather than confining relief to the representative videos considered during the proceedings.

The judgment matters for major rights holders. Had relief been limited to the representative sample, large-scale infringers could effectively benefit from the sheer scale of their infringement by arguing that only the works individually analysed should be the subject of injunctive relief, in circumstances where it would be impossible or hugely costly for a claimant to analyse every example. The decision demonstrates that where representative sampling is properly undertaken and the evidence justifies it the Court is prepared to grant relief that provides effective protection for the rights holder.

The territorial scope of the injunction is also noteworthy. The Court granted relief extending across the UK, the EU and approximately 166 countries party to the relevant international copyright conventions, giving the order what is, in practical terms, worldwide effect. More broadly, the decision reflects the willingness of the English courts to hear disputes with a substantial international IP dimension and, where appropriate, to grant effective relief extending beyond the UK in order properly to protect intellectual property rights.

Brandsmiths acted for Hasbro.

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