Intellectual Property Books

Technology makes it easy to locate information, but how much information should be accessible - and to whom? Privacy in the Information Age addresses many issues, from the ownership and processing of personal data to consumer privacy and law enforcement proceedings. An essential review of privacy foundations.

Mr. Pinckney's book is an excellent desk reference for those of us who provide advice and counsel on trademark matters. Pre-filing knowledge of goods conflicts or non-conflicts is very helpful indeed. For example, should you choose to file a restaurant mark that is similar to one for frozen food? How about similar names for cigarettes and whiskey? Mr. Pinckney has done the legwork and present answers to these and other vexing questions in a straightforward manner. The "whys" are left to the case law but the quick answer is in this book. All trademark attorneys could benefit greatly from this book.

I would give this work a thumbs up and recommend it as an excellent initial guide for anyone seeking legal protection for his work. It is written in plain english and is very readable . I read this book in one sitting and came away with a good overview of the steps every inventor , artist , and author should take in the early stages of developing his work. The book includes sample documents and provides the reader with a step by step guide to securing and preserving intellectual property rights .

This book is reader friendly and exhaustive in discussions of all intellectual property issues. When you finish the book you will be enthusiastic about I.P. and well informed.

Publishing Agreements provides 12 contracts. The value in this book is that each paragraph of each contract is explained on facing pages. Written in the UK, it is especially strong in international contracting.

As the author of 113 books (including revisions and foreign-language editions) and over 500 magazine articles, I highly recommend this volume to book publishers. I have profited from this book for over 20 years. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

At around the time that the Database Directive was passed in the EU, the US was exploring whether databases would have enough legal protection in the context of the internet where it's very easy to copy lots of data quickly. This report was prepared to give an overview of existing legal protection and to explore and predict future trends in protection. Much of it is still current, since pushes for extra database protection have kind of fizzled in the US since the 1990s. It was pretty easy to weed out the dated bits as I read it.

This covers existing legal protection (via unfair competition, copyright, etc), ways that database producers might alter their practices to get legal protection after Feist v. Rural (where the Supreme Court stated that creativity is a prerequisite for copyright protection), an analysis of then pending bill HR 3531 (this bill didn't pass, this section is the most dated of the book), trends on database protection in other countries, etc. An aspect that I found particularly helpful is that the Copyright Office held meetings with parties that had an interest in database protection, and it sounds as if they tried to get a good spectrum of interested parties and be comprehensive about it. This report informally reports on those meetings. There are no transcripts or quotes, but the report will say that this gorup (database producers / scientists / librarians /etc) was adamently for this issue or that this group was split on this issue.

I read this in 2007 for a paper I was writing. It was well organized and still very helpful to me even 10 years later. I was not able to find a more recent comprehensive report on this subject, so even if you are using more recent sources, you should have a look at this to double check for gaps.

A print copy reduces the eyestrain, but right now the only used copy is 121$ - dang, it makes me want to sell both the library copies at my university! You would do better to search this and get the report off the Copyright Office's website, where it is available in pdf for posterity. The author is the Register of Copyrights (Marybeth Peters), jsut to double check that you get the document I'm talking about. Ease of access is one of the points in favor of this report also.

If you only read one book on intellectual property (a huge area that includes copyright, patents, authorship, commons, trademarks, and trade secrets) it should be Debora J Halbert's Resisting Intellectual Property Law (Routledge; 2005). Halbert's text is clearly written, extremely well researched and provides clear examples of the mess into which unbridled property rights has delivered us in the early 21st century.
Resisting Intellectual Property Law attempts to build a theoretical base for the commons. In doing this Halbert develops a strong critique of Habermasian public spheres. I have long been suspicious of Habermas' modernist and bourgeois obsessions and Halbert articulates these "anti-democratic tendencies" (24) far better than I can.
The text goes on to look at End User Licence Agreements versus Open Source. The realities of digital music distribution, and the morality of patents and medicine. Interestingly, the illegal distribution of media is so often portrayed in moral terms by those parties attempting to enforce copyright to texts. Finally the patenting of genetic materials (i.e. the human body) and the ownership of traditional or indigenous knowledge is discussed.
I am only a 1/4 of the way into the text, but not since my first encounter with the works of Lawrence Lessig have I read such an accessible and compellingly argued book on intellectual property. The contents are:

-- Theorizing the public domain: copyright and the development of a cultural Commons
-- Licensing and the politics of ownership: end user licensing agreements versus open source
-- I want my MP3's: the changing face of music in an electronic age
-- Moralized discourses: South Africa's fight for access to AIDS drugs
-- Ownership of the body: resisting the commodification of the human
-- Traditional knowledge and intellectual property: seeking alternatives.

Rethinking copyright does not so much rethink copyright as provide evidence of how the thinking of copyright has mutated over the years and has effectively become rethought. Only by implication does it really suggest that consequently the reader or society should therefore rethink whatever understanding they had concerning copyright - whether better to accord with its ancient instigators, or perhaps to reform it anew in a new digital age.

Deazley spends the first half of the book, chapters 1-3, presenting detailed detective work with considerable citation and reference to a well researched historical record in order to show that successive legal treatises have been so selective (I can only conclude as negligence bordering upon dishonesty and commercial bias), they have steadily transformed the well understood natural right of an author to their secrets INTO the author's `natural right' to govern the use of their secrets even after disclosure - and after they have clearly ceased being secrets.

Copyright now governs the individual. That it was once intended to govern a select few fortunate enough to own printing presses is a vestigial curiosity.

The foundation Deazley so painstakingly arrives at is this: copyright is not, and never has been, a natural right to be protected by common law.

In the second half of the book, chapters 4-6, Deazley begins the process of proposing at least better attention to language, if not its reformation.

He discusses the concept of the public domain, and because the public domain has now been enclosed by a vastness of copyrighted works (that some insist remain within their author's private domain - despite publication), Deazley sees fit to invent a new term, the `Intellectual commons', and what was once the private domain is now termed the `Undisclosed domain'. Published works now fall into overlapping `public domain' and `copyright protected' areas.

If you need evidence that all is not as some lawyers would have you believe, then you'll find it in this book. If you wish to understand how the present law has become such a distorted interpretation of its original incarnations you'll have eminent pointers.

This is an abridged version of my review here:

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This book, in its second version, includes case studies of 15+ archaeological tragedies. The author and contributing experts document the history of the diaspora of archaeological artifacts from their provenances, the use of these articles in nationalistic and religious contexts, and the struggle for repatriation. This is an excellent book for any archaeologist as it reminds us of the modern context of our work. In addition, students of art history, law, anthropology, and history will find the book useful in its breadth of coverage. I have used this book in curriculum building for undergraduate archaeology students.

Joseph Scotchie has written an eloquent first-rate book that
very succinctly covers America's approximately 225 years of Conservative Political Thought. The author makes very clear how and why, over time, that tradition has strayed from its true roots and what implications that has for the future political establishment. All the major figures of American Conservatism throughout the nation's history are examined and how each has influenced the conservative tradition in different ways. I highly recommend this book. It makes it all very clear.