An Escrow Case at Last - Filmflex Movies Ltd v Piksel Ltd
In my early years at the Bar I did a lot of work for John Morris who was in-house legal advisor to the NCC (National Computing Centre). The NCC had been established in 1966 as an autonomous not-for-profit organization, to be the "voice of the computer user", encourage the use of computers in the UK and offer education and training in computers. John spotted an opportunity for his company. He saw a need for source code escrow and persuaded his employers to offer one of the first escrow services in the UK. Escrow is an arrangement by which a software house or software maintenance contractor deposits the latest version of a computer program in human readable form known as "the source code" to a trusted third party such as the NCC ("the escrow agent") with instructions to release the source code to the customer should the software house or maintenance contractor be unable or unwilling to maintain the program because of insolvency or some other ca...