Intellectual Property Books

Excellent book for linguists who find themselves involved in trademark litigation. Strong introduction to trademark law for linguists and useful case studies.

This is a fantastic in-depth book covering the ins and outs of media law. From "Fair Trial-Free Press Conflicts" to `Closed Courtrooms", `Gag Orders on the Media" it really shows the ins and outs about the media and the law, along with how the public can in essence become the jury in a sensational, high profile case.

An interesting, albeit a bit unsettling truth is in this book, I would like to quote comes from page 271:

"Even Alan Dershowitz, a prominent law professor who was a member of Simpson's `dream team' of defense attorneys, defended the role of the "dream team" in his book (Reasonable Doubts) by saying:
A criminal trial is anything but a pure search for truth. When defense attorneys represent guilty clients-as most do, most of the time-their responsibility is to try, by all fair and ethical means, to PREVENT [ my caps italic in the book] the truth about their client's guilt from emerging. Failure to do so...is malpractice."

If you have any interest in fair law, truth, the role and restrictions on the media, and how it all plays out, this book is really a fantastic resource. There is probably an updated edition, however this is the one I have read from cover to cover when it first came out in 2001, and really learned a lot!


Barbara Rose, Ph.D. author of Stop being the String Along: A Relationship Guide to Being THE ONE and Know Yourself
Editor, inspire! magazine

This is one easy book to digest for anyone who wants to have a very quick jumpstart to understanding what IP is all about. However, readers from different countries have to take note that in each country, the legal framework on IP may be different. Overall, this book highlights all the key pointers to IP! Steven Lim (RSTN) - Singapore.

There is a paucity of commentary on moral rights, an often complicated and nebulous area of law lacking international consistency. The only other recent publication (to this author's knowledge) is Maree Sainsbury's book on moral rights. Sainsbury's book, however, concerns only the application of moral rights in Australia. There has yet to be a comprehensive treatise on the global state of moral rights law.

Adeney's book features the following:

1) A very detailed history of moral rights law and an overview of the international state of the law.

This allows one to understand the origin and purpose behind moral rights, and where, as species of personal right, they fit within the proprietary system of intellectual property law. Further, the numerous international instruments such as the WIPO Internet Treaties and the Berne Convention are exhaustively discussed.

2) Full details of the moral rights laws in Germany, France, the US, the UK, Australia and Canada.

It is clearly apparent that between each of these jurisdictions there exists a massive dichotomy between the 'levels' of moral rights protection. Adeney canvasses every single aspect of the laws of these countries and covers a great deal of primary source material. There is a massive amount of translated foreign material which, I'm sure, Adeney would have had to have physically retrieved in each of the respective jurisdictions. Her chapters on each of these jurisdictions is exhaustive, accurate and thoroughly researched. This book is really ALL you would need to get up to speed on the state of moral rights law in any of these jurisdictions (barring, of course, further legislative or judicial development).

3) A 100-page table summarising the moral rights laws in the rest of the world.

This is particularly handy given it is very time consuming and frequently difficult to examine the copyright statutes of every country in the world (via the WIPO website). For those engaging in comparative analysis, as one would probably need to do in any discussion of moral rights given its nascent stage of development in the common law world, this is an invaluable tool.

4) Extensive use of headings, sub-headings, footnotes and a detailed index.

The formatting of Adeney's book is impeccable. It is well presented in hardback, it looks great, it reads well and is thoroughly indexed. Each chapter features a detailed table of contents so you can find what you need to know quickly and without fuss.

TO CONCLUDE, this is an invaluable addition to any intellectual property lawyer's bookshelf. The sheer scope and incredible depth of research truly make it stand alone as a research tool concerning moral rights. Sure, it is an expensive book; however, you really shouldn't need to buy anything else concerning moral rights if you have this publication. The rest you should be able to find online on Westlaw, HeinOnline or LexisNexis.

I just got this book and am finding it very helpful. It discusses copyright law in easy to understand terms and uses lots of examples showing how the law applies. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn how about copyright in general and especially how it applies to music.

Multimedia Legal Handbook is a complete summary of all the issues involved in developing, protecting, and distributing multimedia works. It addresses both the traditional legal issues that impact multimedia and the unique issues raised by the digital revolution.

The Handbook gives you a comprehensive review of the subject - from licensing of traditional content - to the problems posed by the scanning, sampling, and electronic communication of such content. Development, protection, and distribution of multimedia works are governed by several areas of the law including copyright, trade secret, patent, trademark, unfair competition, privacy and publicity rights, and defamation. The author covers these legal areas as they apply to digital multimedia works and to the individual components of the works, including characters, musical recordings, motion pictures, software, and more.

You'll find a thorough review of the traditional and digital legal issues raised, practical methods for protecting rights, and step-by-step guidance on licensing content from other industries.

An excellent and up to date handbook on the burning issue of protecting your digital content. The burgeoning popularity of p2p networks like Morpheus and Kazaa for unauthorised copying and dissemination of audio and [increasingly] video gives urgency to the issue.

The book's chapters fall broadly into two types. One is about encrypting your data so that only authorised customers can access these with some type of key that you furnish.

The other main theme of the book is watermarking or fingerprinting. I use the terms synonymously here. Here, the problem is not so much copying, but for you to later prove that a particular file contains your content. There's some bloody ingenious stuff in these chapters. All about surreptiously embedding a watermark that does not detract from the content's functionality. So that, for example, if it is your audio file, a listener won't notice any degradation. Likewise in imagery. But you can expect a technical opponent to remove your watermark. If it is a JPG file, perhaps he might compress it slightly, and hope this does the removal? The chapters go deeply into this back and forth of tactics.

Expert publications accessible even by the general public are very rare, but Dr. Lu managed to compile an excellent book that exposes in a very professional way the different aspects of multimedia security. In an easy reading and very understandable manner the key topics are being introduced to the reader, providing not only the basic concepts, but also a solid base to build on. Copyright protection, authentication, and fingerprinting of images, audio, video, and documents are only a few of the topics that are introduced and explained in Multimedia Security. A book not to miss on your bookshelf!

This is a seminal book about CONVERGENCE, the chapters cover: Multimedia: Hollywood, Multimedia: Virtual Reality, Multimedia: Law, Multimedia: Telcos/rise of DSL/T1 etc Multimedia: Online Services, Multimedia: The Internet and much more. It is buy the top experts in the field. Editor Joyce Schwarz was the organizer and chairman for the Paris France Internet/ITV Conference from 1995 -1997. She is also the author of "CUTTING THE CORD: Tech TV's Guide to Going Wireless" For more information about this book or publishers seeking an update on the FUTURE OF MULTIMEDIA: email Joyce Schwarz at Joycecom@aol.com

Max Scheler is a now almost forgotten early phenomenologist. He made very objective studies of values, sympathy, sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture. This is one of his masterpieces in which he tries to phenomenological differentiate and explain the meaning of 'sympathy'.

The book differentiates the concept of sympathy from related concepts like fellow-feeling, commiserisation etc. He argues how sympathy is not the same as these concepts and why sympathy is not a form of enlightened self-interest either.

Particularly interesting are his arguments against Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments in which fear motivates sypathy and Freud's concept of guilt as source of such feelings. He also shows how Buddha's concept of universal misery blocks compassion by accepting misery matter-of-factly and expecting everyone to accept and live their misery. The book concludes that sympathy is made possible by empathy but is an irreducible feeling.