Page:JT International SA v Commonwealth of Australia.pdf/52

Gummow J

The present matters before the Court concern intellectual property which has no physical subject matter, unlike a parcel of land or a chattel. However, although disavowed, some of the submissions by the plaintiffs and supporting interveners sought to objectify the intellectual property, particularly the registered trade marks, by attributing a character distinct from the bundle of rights given by the statutes in question. Perhaps to overcome this difficulty, counsel drew attention to the cardboard boxes upon the packaging of which the Packaging Act operates. Like a parcel of land, there might be postulated many uses of that physical subject matter, and thus a range of restraints or "regulation" of that subject matter. However, as counsel for Van Nelle correctly accepted, the only use to be postulated of the packaging was as a cigarette container. To focus upon the cardboard boxes as the subject of the proprietary rights of the plaintiffs would be to present a case both unreal and synthetic.

In Dalziel, Starke J said that, whilst what was conferred upon the Commonwealth was neither ownership nor any estate in the land, the right of temporary possession was to be classified "under the denomination of jura in re aliena [a right in the thing of another], and so a right of property, the subject of acquisition". On the other hand, Rich J concluded that "the Minister has seized and taken away from Dalziel everything that made his weekly tenancy worth having, and has left him with the empty husk of tenancy". Likewise, Williams J emphasised that the Commonwealth had divested Dalziel of that exclusive possession which was "of the very essence of the proprietary interest conferred [by his tenancy]".

It is with an appreciation of the unsuccessful submission put by the Minister in Dalziel and of the somewhat divergent approaches in the reasoning of the Court in that case, that there should be read the synthesis attempted by Dixon J in the Banking Case. In particular, the phrase "innominate and anomalous interests" used there may accommodate the classification by Starke J of the right to possession conferred upon the Commonwealth as jura in re aliena. Dixon J said: