They settled out of court.Now more and more British artists are turning to the law after finding their exclusive ideas in the high street thanks to clever copying by factories in the Philippines, Portugal and Italy, and bargain fabrics widely available from markets in the East.Last week, Kate Byrne, a ceramics artist from south London, was celebrating after a criminal prosecution was taken against the up-market tea and coffee company, Whittard of Chelsea, over a mug design.Other leading stores, including Marks and Spencer, are being challenged by young designers who claim their work has been misappropriated.Robin Fry, a copyright expert with Stephens Innocent, said: “Young designers and other creative people are realising that when someone takes one of your copyright designs, it is a form of dishonesty.”Furthermore, a criminal case can be heard within four or five months of proceedings being issued rather than the years that civil action can take.Whittard was fined pounds 3,000, ordered to pay pounds 3,000 compensation and pounds 10,000 costs for distributing a mug which the company “knew or had reason to believe was an infringing copy of a copyright work”.The action was possible following a change in the law in 1988 to permit criminal action against copyright piracy.Geoffrey Adams, design protection advisor for the Chartered Society of Designers and secretary of the British Copyright Council, said: “In the old days, there was a tendency in the fashion business to say that you just had to put up with it. One firm of City lawyers specialising in copyright, Stephens Innocent, is taking up to two or three calls a day from artists furious over alleged abuses.
The British fashion designers Antoni and Alison began the trend two years ago when they accused Giorgio Armani of copying their work. The church is now in need of renovation, and Mr Gardiner has appealed for pounds 10,000 to fund essential repairs.The good news for Green-sted church is that it is still the oldest wooden building in Europe. Ian Tyers, a dendrochronologist at Sheffield University who dated the Greensted oaks, has checked rival constructions in Scandanavia, and found none dates from before the early 13th century.. Young designers angry at the increasingly widespread theft of their ideas are hitting back with legal action.

It had long been believed that St Edmund, a Saxon king killed by the Danes in about 870, had lain briefly in state in the church. As a result, it was said, Greensted became a place of pilgrimage.The dendrochronological evidence threatens the St Edmund theory, although there are signs of an earlier chapel. The Rev Tom Gardiner, rector of Greensted, said: “This place is still very much a mystery.”The latest hypothesis is that the church originally belonged to the local lord of the manor, who had a second estate and church which was modernised, while Greensted was largely forgotten. Dendrochronology – a technique that dates wood by examining the sequence of rings – has established that the trees were cut down circa 1070, when they were about 200 years old.
The discovery has challenged theories as to the origins of the church and why it survived – it is the only wooden stave structure still standing in Britain. Researchers from Sheffield University have found that Greensted church near Chipping Ongar was built in the late 11th century. The nave was erected using oak trunks, split in half and sunk in the ground.

A tiny church in Essex, thought to date from the ninth century and said to be Europe’s oldest wooden building, has been shown by new evidence probably to have been constructed after the Norman Conquest. Any proposal from Labour to force councils to share their cash with the less well-off would attract fierce opposition.A Conservative Central Office spokesman said: “Capital receipts are part of the way council tax can be kept down by using them to repay debt.” Referring to the row about Labour’s trumpeting of its deal with British Telecom to link schools and hospitals to the information super-highway, he added: “Labour’s pledge to release capital receipts is another glitzy idea which caves into pieces when examined in detail.”. Bromley, in Kent, is thought to have made the highest figure from house sales – pounds 50m – while inner-city boroughs whose tenants live in tower blocks have struggled to raise much at all. Those councils who raised cash from selling homes may not be those who now need to build new ones. “If capital receipts are released, councils will have to arrange replacement borrowing. There is no way that can be done without it costing.”A Department of the Environment spokeswoman admitted the department did not break down the figures between how much had been raised over the years, how much had been spent, and how much was actually available Another problem is that the money is in the wrong place.