In my view, two principles based on public policy are applicable to the present case. Those
principles are, first, that there is no injury in the form of compensable loss through being denied
the expected gain from an unlawful act and, second, that courts will refuse their assistance to
plaintiffs who attempt to take advantage of another’s illegal acts by in effect adopting those acts
as their own. ...I can find nothing in our Copyright Act to deny copyright to an author on the ground that the
work in which the right is asserted is obscene. ... I therefore conclude that the plaintiffs do have
copyright in their respective works and are entitled to seek from the courts such remedies for the
infringement of a right as do not offend fundamental principles of law relating to the granting of
those remedies. ...The purpose of damages in copyright is compensation. Damages are to place the copyright
owner in the same position that he would have been but for the infringement. A claim for
damages then is a claim for loss of expected gain. By s. 3(1) of the Copyright Act the owner has
the sole right to “produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof ”. Thus, the owner
is entitled to compensation where an infringer reproduces a work and sells or distributes it for
profit because the infringer has prevented the owner from taking the anticipated gain flowing
from an act which is the sole right of the owner to perform. However, this entitlement must be
qualified by the broad common law principle that there is no compensable loss where the
copyright owner’s anticipated gain would flow from an illegal act. ...[W]hether or not damages are available with regard to materials which are alleged to be obscene
is a matter of proof of compensable loss. ... [T]hose portions of a work which render it obscene
may be severable and the copyright owner entitled to judgment for the remainder. Therefore, if
the plaintiffs here were able to prove that their works could be edited to an extent where they
were no longer obscene and were still marketable and that the defendants’ distribution, sale,
rental or presentation of the original works injured the plaintiffs by preventing them from making
their anticipated profits from the edited works, they would be entitled to compensation for that
loss. On the facts ... this has not been done. I conclude that no damages have been proved by
the plaintiffs. ...[T]here is no reason why the pirating of an author’s work should not be restrained by injunction.
... The granting of an injunction ... does not imply that the plaintiffs are entitled to
compensation for illegal gain and it does not permit the plaintiffs to take the benefit of the
infringers’ illegal acts. It simply prohibits infringement, regardless of whether or not the
infringing acts are independently contrary to law. I conclude the plaintiffs are entitled to the
injunctions requested of this court. ...Having found the conduct of all parties to be contrary to the moral values of Canadian society,
the parties will bear their own costs.EXAMPLE 5:British courts have recently considered how far they may refuse, on grounds of
public policy, to enforce copyright.Hyde Park Residence Ltd v. Yelland [2000] 3 W.L.R. 215 (U.K.: High Court
and Court of Appeal)[Mr Mohamed Al Fayed claimed in a book on the death of Princess Diana that(^50) his son Dodi and Diana had visited Al Fayed’s Paris home on a particular