Shipbuilding Law Blog

In Salt Ship Design AS v Prysmian Powerlink SRL ,  Prysmian appointed Salt as their exclusive designer under a contract for the design of a new build cable laying vessel (CLV). Salt also granted Prysmian the right to build the CLV based on Salt’s design package. Section 6.4 of the contract provides that: “The design, data, documents and know-how and all relevant copyrights, patents or other intellectual property rights related to the Scope of Work supplied by the Designer under this Contract shall remain the intellectual property of the Designer, …. The Client may disclose relevant documentation only to its suppliers and employees on a need-to-know basis. The Client is not entitled to send or make available the General Arrangement and/or Building Specification as a complete document to a third party, including any suppliers, but excepting the Yard, without the prior approval of the Designer”   About a year later Salt’s involvement in the design process came to an end. Around the same t

The parties to a potential shipbuilding project may often conduct pre-contract negotiation by in-person meeting or electronic means (telephone, telex, or email). In the latter case, there have been disputes on whether the terms of such negotiation were subject to the signing of a memorandum of agreement with terms to be mutually agreed, or whether the contemplated memorandum of agreement was simply to record the terms of a binding contract reached between the parties. In  Okura & Co Ltd v Navara Shipping Corp SA   [1 ] the parties entered into a contract for the construction and sale of a ship. The buyer canceled the contract because of delays. Subsequently, the parties negotiated a new contract by telephone calls and telex. A memorandum of agreement (MOA) reflecting the terms in the telex was drafted but it included a term that was inconsistent with the telex. This was rejected by the shipbuilder and the MOA was never signed. During the trial, the buyer argued that there was a bin