Intellectual Property Books

101 Questions About Copyright Law is just that... 101 random questions pertaining to Copyright Law and their answers are included here. I found that this book will be helpful, but that I also needed something that would go further into detail than just a standard "question-answer" format. In my opinion, this is the type if book that will be most useful as a type of quick reference manual. As a beginner's book I find that it will be used best in addition to other books that I purchased containing more in-depth material.

I enjoyed my first read through the book fairly well. It's clearly written, and gave a pretty good overall feel for the way that copyright law works. So it's still on my shelf, and I don't feel bad about the little bit it cost me.

But...

Exactly as the title suggests, the book is a series of questions and their answers. Although there is a sort of progression from question to question, there is no index, no table of contents, and no real grouping of questions into categories. So if I have a specific question, it would be very hard to find the answer in this book.

Overall, I'd say it's a decent read, but a very poor reference.

Even at this low price, the book isn't worth it. You get the questions and answers--but no organization, no grouping of questions into related topics or chapters, no list of question, no index--no way to search for just what you need to know. Have a specific question? You will have to browse through the entire book to find it. The book also does not give enough of a background to help writers make informed decisions. This was a book written by a lawyer, not a writer, and it shows.

Save your money and buy Cheryl Besenjak's "Copyright Plain and Simple" instead.

This book is touted as a "balanced" discussion of the subject matter. Not so. It is decidedly slanted towards the viewpoints of museums and collectors and shortchanges other viewpoints, including those of archaeologists and others determined to halt looting of cultural sites and the trade in illicit antiquities. One example of bias: While reading the chapter on the Portrait of Wally litigation, I was conviced that the author did not understand the legal process because so much of what of what he lamented actually made sense in terms of how a litigation progresses. Was I shocked to find that not only was the author a lawyer, but he was a lawyer for one of the parties in that lawsuit (notably the one who didn't win many of the court's rulings). How can you expect a balanced perspective from someone like that? He is entitled to his opinion, but he was a sore loser who twisted the description of the legal process in order to make his point. While I found it worthwhile to read these perspectives, I felt that I had been duped into buying this book on the premise that it actually represented many points of view.

This book is sponsored by the American Council for Cultural Policy and is an excellent illustration that this organization is completely devoid of ethics. The various articles in the volume detail how the 'innocent' art and antiquities dealer and collector could and should be protected by U.S. law, all the while defaming the rights and plight of Native Americans, victims of Nazi appropriations, and countries suffering from massive art market-driven looting, to name only a few. Property laws figure heavily in these debates, but naturally the question of how stolen or looted art and antiquities become the 'property' of collectors and dealers is answered in such ways as to show the dealers and collectors as the true victims of both the thefts and the judicial systems. Although the book is claimed as a balanced discussion of the many complex issues surrounding the ownership of cultural property, it is clearly in the corner of the wealthy dealers and collectors (and their lawyers).

This book is not a multi-page lamentation on how various people are "oppressed" by the evil rich collectors who steal their culture for the sake of owning curios. This book is written from a very balanced perspective that takes into consideration the textural aspects of this issue, from both a cultural patrimony standpoint and one of the antiques trade.

If you are looking for a book that will reaffirm your belief that the "evil rich collectors" are oppressing the poor ethnic peoples, this isn't it. If you are looking for a book that is blame-centric and seeks to demonize people who can afford to buy antiquities, this isn't it either.

If you are looking for a cool-headed, honest assesment of the issue that takes into account all parties involved, you will be well served with this book.

This book is not a very good study aid. Firstly, it is missing about 30 pages. The book skips from p.50 to p.80. After about twenty pages, it skips back to p.80. This means many cases are missing.

The book is also very old. Patent law has evolved very quickly over the past few years and this book contains none of these updates. The cases it does contain are a great review, but this is not sufficient as the recent cases have developed many new laws and test. Though it is much longer and more expensive, it is worth it to get An Introduction to Patent Law by Meuller as it contains the majority of the recent law and is a great review of the material. Of course the book does not have the most recent cases, such as KSR, as those rulings are too recent to even have time to publish a review of it.

This book contains legal briefs for common cases read in patent law courses. It was very helpful, especially in courses taught using text by Adelman, Rader, Thomas, and Wegner.

Maybe this was written by an attorney, but I doubt it. This was not useful as a research tool. Written in 2001, it failed to mention the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a hugely significant piece of legislation for intellectual property rights on the internet. Its omission is completely horrifying.

Further, the discussion of black letter law is all first year law school stuff. Not a tool for lawyers. Or anyone. Really, without the DMCA this book isn't applicable to current law.

I purchased the book to learn more about intellectual property. I could easily tell it was written by an attorney with the gift of gab. Overall the book had some very valid points, did a good job of covering intellectual property laws, just a little hard to follow.

Mr. Besing's book is a great guide to telecommunications in the U.S. for laymen. It is a history of the Bell telephone monopoly and how that monopoly was broken up by the author and other attorneys representing small companies who simply wanted to compete with the AT&T and the Bell Telephone System. Most of us do not know or understand what happened to convert an enormous industry from a pervasive monopoly to real competition. As the attorney for two of the little guys who took on AT&T, then the largest company on Earth, the author gives a blow-by-blow account of the long struggle over a 20-year period in the U.S. to bring lower prices and technological innovation to the industry which affects everyone, everyday. It is truly amazing that these "little people" were able, against overwhelming odds, to transform our communications world, from telephones to the Internet to I-phones. Without this book the public could never know how dominant and self-serving the Bell System was for almost a century or how difficult it was to change the industry by using fundamental laws which Congress and the Administration should have employed to break the unlawful monopoly. A truly moving story all of us should know.

This book is poorly written, terribly long, and woefully boring and written by an "author" for lack of a better word whose arrogance shines through the each and every word. Don't read it.

Apparently, while Corynne McSherry was a law student at Stanford writing this book, she was looking to carry over some sort of unexplained grudge from her graduate days at UCSD. I didn't know her personally when I was also a graduate student at UCSD, but McSherry was friends with a small subset of students in my laboratory who, instead of doing science, seemed to spend a majority of their days sitting around thinking of ways to try to torment me on the sole basis that I was a highly talented, passionate female scientist. It didn't work most of the time, but still, what a pain in the choo-choo that was!

Anyway, it might go a long way toward explaining why this book reads so much to me like McSherry took a page from the Karl Rove Book of Slime and created this hit piece disguised as an academic work. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Agouron Pharmaceuticals, the other half of the "Pelletier v Agouron Pharmaceuticals" lawsuit that is so prominently featured on the opening pages of this book, paid her way through law school in exchange for allowing them to hijack what may have started out as a reasonable thesis (mostly the middle part of the book covering the history of intellectual property in academia), but ended up being some sort of convoluted, sick argument in support of pharmaceutical companies stealing as much basic research data they can from academic scientists, falsifying whatever they aren't able to steal, and publishing it all as their own independent research.

Believe it or not, there is still no system in place (though Mother Nature knows I tried -- through the NIH, NSF, FDA, UC Regents, the scientific journal where Agouron's half-stolen/half-falsified work was published, even the National Academies of Science -- until finally resorting to a legal remedy) for preventing pharmaceutical companies from behaving this way with non-patentable basic research work published in the scientific literature. And contrary to the faulty premise of this book (that scientific publications are of little value to anybody but academic scientists), such publications, even if presenting only basic research and nothing patentable yet, can be extremely valuable and sought after, especially to a budding start-up company, because they can add scientific prestige and even a big stock boost with the proper media attention.

The reason the beginning and end of this book stand out apart from the rest, as another reviewer notes, is because these are the parts that were probably written mostly by Agouron attorneys, as is evident from the fact that most of the writing in these parts seems to be just a regurgitation of seven years' worth of Karl Rove type press releases that Agouron issued against me during the course of this lawsuit, many of them hinting that I was not a very good scientist and that my main motivation in the lawsuit was just a sour grapes attempt to get money and attention:

"Without a major publication under her belt, Pelletier was simply a vulnerable and mostly unknown postdoctoral researcher, with little academic credit to invest in her own defense" (pg. 195). "As a young post-doctoral researcher, the (scientific project involved in the lawsuit) was supposed to be Dr. Pelletier's ticket to scientific success" (Introduction).

It is not like Ms. McSherry was unaware of my 1992 Ph.D. thesis from UCSD, which was unrelated to the work involved in the lawsuit and was completed two years before I finally sued Agouron in 1994 (after months of attempted negotiations with them to be reasonable and not publish the work they stole from me), two years before I became an apparently "unknown postdoctoral researcher with little academic credit and no major publication to her name."

For the record (which you are not going to get an accurate account of in this book), my Ph.D. thesis was published as a major research article in the top scientific journal in the country -- Science, soon thereafter became the second most cited paper in chemistry for its time period, was featured as a cover story for Chemical and Engineering News in February of 1993, landed several invited lectures for me around the world, including France, Germany, Italy, and China, and is to this day still featured in all major biochemistry textbooks.

Yes, Corynne McSherry was fully aware of my scientific accomplishments at the writing of this book, as was the unfortunately jealous subset from my laboratory whom she hung out with and who, at the behest of Agouron Pharmaceuticals, plotted and eventually succeeded at stealing my subsequent postdoctoral research work in 1992/1993 and handing it over to Agouron Pharmaceuticals for immediate publication.

"Who Owns Academic Work" was published, not-so-coincidentally, in the Fall of 2000, just weeks before an unprecedented and completely unfounded decision was handed down from a California Appeals Court on my case, where a well-deserved $200,000 monetary award against Agouron Pharmaceuticals that was granted to me by 12 out of 12 jurors after a two-week trial, was reduced to $1.00 despite every other aspect and decisions of the jurors being upheld. Why? Because, the Court ruled, they were not sure "who owns academic work." Apparently, the academic work that Agouron scientists stole from an academic laboratory and published as their own was, in effect, really owned by the public anyway, right? -- i.e. Agouron -- and the Court, against the better judgment of twelve of my peers, could find no damage done to me nor to my career that justified such a monetary award.

In other words, a young and talented academic female scientist's non-patentable basic research work is easy pickings and can be taken at will prior to publication by any pharmaceutical company and published as its own, as they saw fit, and heaven forfend that the young scientist have any recourse for this base and inexcusable action, lest the entire academic world suffer "earth-shattering consequences," as McSherry laughingly calls it.

In fact, if you read between the lines carefully enough (from both the book and the Court decision and even the reviews of the book), you could almost swear any such well-deserved decision against any US pharmaceutical company might pose a threat to national security! LOL!

Give me a break...

I reviewed this book for the Journal of Technology Transfer. I thought it would be a simple explaination of legal cases and their implications on university IP. Though it had that at the beginning and end, the real meat of the book is the middle, which explains the university culture better than any book I have ever read. Without understanding that culture, it is hard to know the impact of the cases that McSherry cites. It is often a tough read, but well worth the effort to learn about the history of the copyright system, the role of the gift-economy and commercial ecomomy clash that commercialization issues force on universities as well as the particulars of cases that have the potential to dramatically change how the university functions based on the precedence of several key legal cases. Those whom I have recommended it to, have agreed with me that it is a very valuable book!

While reading through other reviews of this book I noticed not only that they were negative as a whole but also that they were all written prior to the (WTC and Pentagon among suspected others) terrorist attacks in the US on 9/11/2001.

In light of the fact that we can see much more clearly now how "ultimate" privacy can be a "not so perfect" thing, and how complete privacy may actually hinder our own safety and security, I imagine this book and the ones to follow will get more balanced reviews.

I also imagine that this book and other works by this author or those with similar backgrounds and views might aid or even guide the many people and organizations that will have to now deal with the true issues of "privacy" in this electronic age.

I thought the author was in his element, though an under appreciated element at the time. Looking at the book again, I certainly still recall my own feeling that this author was on a different side of the proverbial fence than I have ever been. However, his insight is invaluable and in retrospect, even somewhat balanced, and the issues he brings to light are pertinent.

The evolution of thoughts, facts, and opinions similar to the ones found in this book will (imo) be a driving force behind the development of an acceptable solution to the strained relationship between privacy and security which we have all been feeling in one way or another. Not bad in retrospect...

Mr Baker seeks to justify a policy which will arbitrarily restrict your access to information and privacy. Quite an unpleasant surprise! Combine that with his patronizing tone, and you have a thoroughly unpleasant book.

I returned my copy.

I saw this book at a local bookstore and picked it up, hoping to find an impartial look at cryptography in the new global marketplace. What I found instead was a somewhat Orwellian perspective on information control seasoned with a generous amount of hubris. Baker envisions a future where the plutocrats conduct their business in utmost security, where only those with worthy causes are allowed access to strong cryptography. The first question that comes to my mind is: who will determine which individuals and corporations have "worthy" causes? The government? Lawyers, perhaps? Baker seems much more concerned with the money such a system would put in his pocket than with personal privacy, and it shows.

Shame, shame on our Mr. Baker, trying to explain to us the reasons why limiting privacy to those who have "worthy" causes should be the only ones with the means to keep secrets secret. It looks like the bureaucratic "bull" can't keep up with the rest of us. People are fed the notion that "hackers" are individuals who like to promote choas. NOT SO, I SAY! We just like figuring things out. Anyone who reads this, please go and talk to that computer nerd next door, or the geek who works with you.... You'll see, we don't like people who break the law either. BUT THIS! Geeze.........

Baker succeeds in his attempt to ruin free commerce in America, and throughout the world. I'm sick of people like himself trying to screw the normal citizen out of more and more money as the corporations continue to issue unrealistic and unfair demands on the public. I definitely disapprove of this trash literature and hope others will be able to see through his lies as well.

But it depends on your point of entry. If you have no idea about how patenting works, have never tried to market an invention and want an easily comprehendable "...for dummies"-introduction, it's good.

First reviewer does have a point about the loose structure though and those who already have a take on the whole thing might want something on the next level.

The book is most successful when the writer discusses his own experience with particular products and when he explains the pitfalls for the creative mind interfacing with "the real world".

an unedited rambling mess. Don't waste your money

The book has some interesting information but it is certainly not worth the cost. Many of the legal conclusions seem unsupported and the text is poorly edited.

Looking for a very good layman's explaination of Intellectual Property? This thorough explaination of the newest frontier of law is exactly what you need. The best part, reference charts and websites will help you "zoom" into the subject matter!

Although this book purports to be about international intellectual property, it approaches the subject with such a leaning toward the US system that I feel as if I'm re-taking an intro to US IP. This book is bad. The cases, while illustrative, are nearly all US cases. Consider other alternatives when selecting a book for your class - perhaps a book that understands the word "international" means something more than US law.