Intellectual Property Books

The sub-title for "Let's Talk Patents" tells us it's a patent primer for "Busy Corporate Managers and Entrepreneurs." What it does not say is that it is also a primer for any inventor who would throw off the cloak of ignorance.

Why? Because ignorance of patent law [ignorance: not having knowledge of a certain thing] may lead to unintended forfeiture of patent rights, or worse, being scammed out of money the inventor cannot afford.

Anyone who might be put off by the word "primer" must consider -- where do you get your knowledge of patents now? In High School or College? Not likely. Only a couple conventional colleges in the U.S. even have courses on inventing and patenting. So how does one learn about this vital subject? From TV ads? Advice from a brother-in-law? Some business article or column you read years ago? Unfortunately, the answer is too often, yes. That's a pretty meager education on a subject that may change one's life... Now perhaps a "patent primer" is starting to make more sense? Especially if you would rather not appear too stupid when you do reach that point where you need to talk to a patent attorney.

Let's assume you are a fairly typical problem solver, manager, or free thinker, and maybe even a grasp of the concept of invention -- patent -- money. Most everyone does. But if words or phrases like "intellectual property rights", "prior art", "doctrine of equivalents", "disclosure", or "infringement" are not a part of your vocabulary, you can offer a big Thank You to Ms. Etherton for writing and publishing "Let's Talk Patents." She is a registered patent attorney, but because she avoided writing it in "lawyer-ease," your ignorance is about to dissipate.

Upon opening her book and looking at the list of contents, "WOW" would be an automatic response. You may not have ever pondered questions about "Statutory Invention Registration" or "Direct and Indirect Infringement" but now, all of a sudden, you realize you are holding in your hands not just a book about patent education, but a real reference jewel. "Let's Talk Patents" suddenly becomes a valuable resource for information -- for you!

Before even finishing the first chapter, there's another revelation: "Let's Talk Patents" could easily have created a high intimidation response by being another compendium of dry, factual pages. But oh no, it's not... In fact, Ms. Etheron's style is so direct --so clear -- that her teaching examples make it very easy for us to relate to things we already know. Who could not relate to: "walking into a dark alley unarmed" and "red flat" or "...it's usually the money, who has it and who gets it."

Her straight talk, easy language and understandable examples, such as the problems of two competing bicycle manufactures, pull the reader along so smoothly they may not be aware of how much they're learning. That's talent.

After Etherton's book, when someone says "Let's Talk Patents" you will be armed and ready.

Sandra has done a very good job of presenting a complex subject in a very approachable manner. While not exhaustive, this book will give you a good basic understanding of patents and how they can help a business reach its goals.

This little book tells you: what patents can and cannot do for you; how and whether to apply for a patent; how long a patent can protect your idea; the cost and time required to get a patent; etc. The writing is informal with clear examples and minimum jargon. It can be read quickly to provide good advice before deciding on whether to try to get a patent.

This book is heavy on the legal information (it's from Nolo Press) but light on what to do to get an invention licensed. Has good legal advice which would be a use to any invcentor who has a deal ready to go, but not much help on evaluating the proct for license or how to get a licenseing deal to come about. Would recommend this book only for those who have already made prototypes, contacted licensees, and are ready to start writing contracts - then get this useful book.

I felt that this book provided a firm clear basis to write a contract to license your invention. I have to agree that it did little but rehash the usual ways of marketing your invention. Perhaps the book should have be titled: Write a good contract for licensing your invention.

I thought this book took you nicely through each step in the licensing process explain your legal rights and the legal rights of others in detail. I enjoyed the book and thought it was easy to read despite covering alot of legalese.

"Take Your Great Idea to Market With a Solid Legal Agreement" promises this new book. The promise is fulfilled with plenty of solid details about the licensing process. This is not about venturing or bringing your own invention to market, but about protecting your property rights while licensing the invention. This would include inventors who work for companies that may want to license their work.

I generally like the NOLO series because the books are well-written and easy to understand for beginners. I received this book as a gift and it was valuable in learning the basics. However, I needed to learn more, so I later discovered other related books in the NOLO series. So I guess it all depends on how much you want to know as a beginner. If just the basics, then "Patents for Beginners" is adequate. If you need a deeper understanding, then I would recommend "Patent, Copyright & Trademark".

An impressive and "reader friendly" compendium of information and instruction Nolo's Patents For Beginners is the ideal introduction to the patenting process for novice inventors and entrepreneurs. Written in plain English, the reader is provided with up-to-date principles of patent law; shown how to properly "read" a patent application; shown the nuts and bolts of patent ownership; informed what the inventor's social or economic status is irrelevant; learn how to analyze and resolve patent disputes; what patents don't inherently provide "defensive" protection; and what the fundamentals of international patent law are. Nolo's Patents For Beginners is a highly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, corporate, and community library reference patent law collections.

This is an excellent book to get a fast and accurate overview of patents -- what they are, how they are created and defended, etc. Although some books have more detail (e.g., "Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference") have more detail, this book condenses it into the necessary parts which are excellent for beginning jurists, expert witnesses, or someone contemplating creating a patent.

Great book detailing the ins and outs of entertainment scriptwriting contracts and negotiations. Recommend this highly!

As a budding screenwriter, I find this book helpful in a way that I can enrich myself with the knowledge that otherwise has to be earned through hours of lawyer's consulting fees. the

How do you know if you're getting a fair deal? How do you protect your original creation? And what does it mean when they tell you you're going to get a share of "Net Profits?" This is an invaluable resource for screenwriters. Stephen Breimer is an entertainment lawyer who really knows his stuff. It's great that he took the time to make this information available (for a lot less money than he'd charge for an hour of his time!). Screenwriters, don't be taken! Check it out (or better, buy it!).

You need to understand that information and knowledge are the key to overcoming or finding the most efficient way to solve a problem. Humanity's infrastructure has created a tremendous amount of infrastructure. It is critical, for the person who would be effective, to take a perspective of where the information may lie and how to best access it.

This book is not the most focused response to approaching this very fundamental problem - it is more a technical study for a subquestion in information science and policy. But it IS something that will begin to steer one in the right direction of developing a perspective of how to map knowledge in society - who owns it, where it is in society, and how to begin accessing it. The necessary skills are that this helps with is in developing a nascent understanding of the economics of information and knowledge sharing.

This is a unique book by a very respected scholar. It methodically goes, chapter by chapter, over who owns your name and address (the U.S. Postal Service does), your telephone number, your medical history, your image, your electronic messages, video entertainment, religious information, computer software, and government information. The answers are not always obvious. A real benchmark.

Information privacy is a dynamic field. This is a good introductory book to key concepts. It is also a nice guide to key legal decisions that have influenced current information privacy policy in the United States. The legal cases are presented in an approachable, narrative form -- not a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo. The only shortcoming of this book is that it was published in 1994. A lot has changed since then. Even so, I recommend it as a starting point for those just stepping into the realm of information privacy.

In reading this review, keep in mind that I am a lay person in the truest sense of the word, and so I brought no prior understanding to the subject of "cultural ownership" in reading this book. With that caveat, my review:

In Who Owns Native Culture? Brown successfully combines two philosophical perspectives to the subject: the legal view, and the social/anthropological view. In the legal view, he covers applicable law, and emerging international conventions in several different countries. In the social view, he turns away from the formal rationalism of the law, to the formal irrationality of numerous social views, such as "emotivism". Throughout numerous case studies, he relates the opinion that entirely legal constructs will not work in preserving Native Culture. He thoroughly rejects the idea that a single legal framework can cover all situations, as a result, he promotes the case by case approach of negotiations.

One small problem I had was that in the chapter on Ethnobotany, some sections read like a press release directly from Shaman Pharmaceuticals, touting the superiority of the drug Provir, whose efficacy was in fact minimal. Beyond this, my lack of knowledge of the subject precludes a more comprehensive review.

How much we need a book that looks with unjaundiced eyes on the issue of cultural ownership and cultural appropriation. This is that book, but with a caveat: there is something slightly out of balance here, with the overbalance being in the form of a bias toward an intellectual definition of ownership. Brown is a scholar, and a worthy one. As such, his virtue is a healthy skepticism toward all points of view, rather than an unreflective sympathy toward each. In a sense, he is a debunker, not a sequential believer, and this places him in a distinct relationship to his material that seems to this reader to militate against a sympathy toward that which cannot be explicated or analyzed by rational means. I know I am getting murky here. But the simple fact is that you cannot do justice to non-analytical traditions and points of view by the application of analysis. This is perhaps better explained by demonstration in a wonderfully subtle treatise by Kent Nerburn called Neither Wolf nor Dog. Here, in the guise of a novel or some sort of fictionalized non-fiction, a man who has lived with native people takes on the subject from a different angle. He, too, comes up a bit short by using a device that is perhaps too clever by half. But he gets me closer to an understanding by embodying conflicting points of view and expressing them with the conviction of different systems of belief. I suggest that the reader consider both these books as distinct halfs to a very difficult whole. Though the distance between them is great, it is in the space in the center that some true understanding of the problem of cultural appropriation and ownership will be found.

In this book, Michael Brown discusses a wide range of cases in which indigenous cultures and cultural artifacts are used or appropriated by majority (or foreign) cultures. The kinds of issues that he discusses include folk tales, folk music, native art, traditional ecological knowledge (including medicinals), crop varieties used primarily by Native peoples, and religious beliefs and objects that have been borrowed by others.

His strategy is to avoid establishing hard-and-fast rules but to explore, sympathetically, middle-ground solutions that respect Native beliefs and rights. He argues that general rules often cause more harm, introducing elements of policing and control that cause Native peoples to lose control over their own culture. According to Brown, negotiated solutions among well-meaning people can lead to better resolutions in individual cases, while also developing new principles that may prove to be useful in future disputes.

Brown explores these issues through a series of cases and anecdotes, which he seems to have chosen in a completely haphazard way. He tells the stories journalistically, providing his own commentary and the opinions of both sides of each issues. This approach makes the book very readable but not fully satisfactory to people looking for systematic treatment of these issues.

Hardliners will be offended because Brown does not give Natives exclusive control over their own heritage. He would argue that all culture includes shared (social) elements as well as individual elements (artistry for example), and that both features are routinely shared. Cultures borrow from one another all the time - - New Age beliefs borrow from Native religious, Native cultures have borrowed from Christianity and Islam. Exclusive rights ignore these elements of sharing, exchange, and new syntheses.

Brown is likely to satisfy most well-meaning people from majority cultures, such as liberal whites in the United States, Canada or Australia. Those people who regularly end up on the short end of the stick will be suspicious of consensus solutions, which reflect power imbalances in more subtle ways. This book awaits a response from them, but nonetheless represents a respectful attempt at reasonable solutions to these various problems.

Maybe it's all the legal jargon, but this book's a little tough to plow through... okay, fine, it's boring to read, for me anyway.

The info in it is important to know. I wish it was presented in a much more accessible way though.

The Writer's Legal Guide is an invaluable reference for published and unpublished writers alike. Relevant and significant areas of the law are explained in helpful and easy to understand terms. This book is essential to dealing successfully with the business side of publishing, as all writers must at some point in their careers. Learn your rights and responsibilities as a writer, become knowledgeable about Copyright and First Amendment law, and be prepared to handle publishers and agents. The Writer's Legal Guide is well prepared to be your "guide".

This comprehensive quick reference guide is a must have for writers. *Especially first-time authors.* I recommend it to all writers that I mentor. Believe me - when you demonstrate at least some knowledge of contracts - you'll get a better one!

Elizabeth Stevenson's book provides a comprehensive insight into one of the most fascinating periods in American hisory. Her survey of the three Republican Administrations headed by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover illuminates an ambivalence towards the American body politic by its ordinary citizens that has endured to the present day, interrupted only by the keen politcal awareness that was forced upon American citizens by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her account of the decade's vulgar excesses is brilliantly balanced by an acknowledgement of the achievements of those who were dedicated to causes in politcs, science and particularl, the arts. In literature, her areas of interest are clearly poetry and prose. Here, perhaps is the only fault that I could level at a book which I read in one siting. The decade was after all, one of the most vibrant in the history of the American Theatre, with the emergence of one great "anti-Babbitt," Eugene O'Neill. The dramatist receives only passing mention, but would no doubt have loved the author's description of him as "a half-educated vagabond." Otherwise this marvellous book betrays no obvious prejudices. Seamus Melinn.

A serious and thoughtful history of the 1920s - which was not all frivolity and hedonism (though they were a large part of it.) Labor strife was rampant, and socialism was a real force to be reckoned with (in 1918, Eugene Debs, the Socialist Presidential candidate, got one million votes even though he was in prison in Florida at the time). Stevenson writes with great style and authority.

I was lucky enough to see this book in draft form, and even before the final spit-and-polish touches, it was a pleasure to read. The author has a real gift for metaphor; almost every chapter is organized around a vivid, memorable concept. He compares the format of a patent document to the ELF file format; he uses the secret recipe for the Flaming Moe to talk about trade secrets. The result is an introduction to IP law that's unusually fun to read.

But the clarity and verve of the writing doesn't detract from the book's main goal: showing the reader how the IP system works and affects open source software. The author has exercised very good judgment in paring down an immensely complicated body of law into an approachable set of important principles. The reader gets the big picture overview, a clear understanding of the truly important details, and a good sense of what else is out there and how to find out more. This book doesn't try to be a definitive reference or a dumbed-down sketch. Instead, it hits the sweet spot in between: informative and readable.

I've been involved in open source and the software world for over 10 years now, and have read every book on open source and legal issues that has been written. This is by far the best.

Why? Because it lays out in clear, easy-to-understand language what open source means for the developer. You don't have to be a legal expert to grasp the principles laid out in the book. In fact, Lindberg walks the reader through commonly obtuse principles by analogizing to software principles that the reader will easily understand.

In addition, it's very well-written. Lindberg has an outstanding style that makes this readable. I won't say it's like reading Charles Dickens, but at times it really is that enjoyable.

This book covers the basics of the legal and business aspects of being a photographer. Duboff wastes no words. The book is thoughtful, concise, well organized and easy to read. The court cases he cites are interesting and thought provoking as well as useful information. This book is an invaluable reference for setting up a professional photography business.

Another great reference book for the small business owner. Very up to date. It includes a chapter on doing business on the Internet.