The High Court has been asked to decide if a "power CD", a compact disc containing sound recordings, text graphics and visual images, is a record within the meaning of the 1963 Copyright Act.
Mr Justice Barr is hearing a dispute between a manufacturer of such CDs and the Mechanical Copyright Production Society (Ireland) Ltd (MCPS), a copyright collection society acting for music publishers.
Mandarim Records Ltd, with registered offices in Wilton Place, Dublin, has asked the court to declare that power CDs are records.
In court yesterday Mr Richard Nesbitt SC, for Mandarim, said the company manufactured for the Spanish market. A normal CD had sound tracks only but a power CD had additional information stored in the form of text, photographs and certain electronic videos.
A person with a computer which had multi-media capabilities could not only listen to the music but watch text and graphics. MCPS claimed that because the CD contained other information besides sound recordings, it should not be described as a record within the meaning of the 1963 Act.
Mr Justice Barr asked if this was much of a departure from the "primeval times" when it was common to buy a collection of records along with documentation which would contain assorted information relating to the music.
Mr Nesbitt said the only new departure was an electronic function instead of paper. As there was no synchronisation of pictures to sound then it was not a video recording.
Mr Nesbitt said that in relation to a power CD what might be seen was perhaps a picture of the Beatles with people screaming in the background or Bob Dylan, but it was never synchronised with the sound.
If one put the power CD into an ordinary compact disc, all one would get was the sound.
Mr Javier Manas Reuda, from Madrid, a director of Mandarim Records, said in an affidavit that pressing of records by his company was undertaken in Ireland by a number of pressing plants.
The company had been in Ireland since 1996 and had pressed more than four million records. The records were for the most part compilation recordings of earlier records. Before making such recordings Mandarim's practice was to give notice to MCPS.
Mr Reuda said that the CD could be considered to be the modern equivalent of records and books together. The power CD was a modern way of storing the visual materials with the sound recording on one record.
In an affidavit Mr Victor Finn, general manager of MCPS, said Mandarim had not explained that it was generally accepted within the music business that the special exemption in the Copyright Act did not apply to the reproduction of music works with visual images and that the consent of the copyright owner of music must be got before such use could occur.
Mr Finn said it was misleading to claim that the use of the power CD was the modern way of storing visual materials with sound recordings on one record.
The result was not "one record" but an audiovisual work comprising an audio product and moving visual materials, both of which could be reproduced together when the power CD was played in computers.
The hearing continues today.