Legal Challenges in the New Digital Age addresses a wide range of legal issues related to emerging technologies. These technologies pose prominent legal challenges, in particular, how to wedge new phenomena into old frameworks; whether we can and should delegate responsibilities to technologies and how to cope with newly created powers of manipulation. Edited by Ana Mercedes Lopez Rodriguez, Michael D. Green and Maria Lubomira Kubica, the book's sixteen chapters are written by highly qualified international practitioners and academics from different jurisdictions. Familiarity with the intricacies of emerging technologies is essential for judges, practitioners, legal staff, business people and scholars. This book's combination of highly thought-provoking topics and in-depth analysis will prove indispensable to all interested parties.

A comprehensive, stimulating introduction to trusts law, which provides readers with a clear conceptual framework to aid understanding of this challenging area of the law. Aimed at readers studying trusts at an undergraduate level, it provides a succinct and enlightening account of this area of the law.
Concise and clear, this book also identifies and discusses many analytical perspectives, encouraging a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. It offers an outstanding treatment of specific areas, in particular remedial constructive trusts and trusts of family homes. Ideal for providing a broad background to the issues before embarking on an in-depth study of trusts, it can also be used to help the reader to develop their understanding. For those looking to challenge themselves, detailed footnotes highlight further issues and point the direction for future reading.
Fully revised to take into account the Charities Act 2006, judicial developments through case law, and recent academic work in this area, this new edition in the renowned Clarendon Law Series offers a well-written, careful, and insightful introduction to the law of trusts.

This fully revised and updated edition of Intellectual Property Rights for Engineers addresses recent developments in the area. The book explains the general principles behind the law protecting innovation, quoting cases from the engineering domain in order to clarify legal issues. Chapters outline the basic rights through automatic protection (copyright, design right) and registration systems (patent, registered design, trade mark), and also discusses the issues surrounding confidential information. The book clarifies precisely who owns the rights and how their use is constrained by EC law, and goes on to explain how to license or even litigate when necessary. Finally, strategic aspects for decision-making and management are discussed.

This book offers a new look at the legal and cultural implications of bequests that crossed the color line. ""Fathers of Conscience"" examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues - over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.

In today's globalized economy, many inventors, investors and businesses want their inventions to be protected in many, if not most, countries. However, there currently exists no single patent that will protect an invention globally, and despite the attempts in international treaties to simplify patenting, the process remains complicated, lengthy, and expensive. Furthermore, the necessity of enforcing patents in multiple countries exists without any possibility of concentrating in one location any parallel proceedings that concern the same invention and the same parties, thus making the maintenance of parallel patents infeasible.
Global Patents: Limits of Transnational Enforcement, by Marketa Trimble, explains why the absence of a "global patent" persists, and discusses the events in the 140-year history of patent law internationalization that have shaped the solutions. The author analyzes the ways in which patent holders attempt to mitigate the problems that arise from the lack of global patent protection. One way is to concentrate enforcement in one court of patents granted in multiple countries, which makes the enforcement of the patents less costly and more consistent. Another way is to attempt to use the litigation of a single country patent to reach acts that occur outside the country, which can mitigate the lack of patent protection outside the country. However, both the concentration of proceedings and extraterritorial enforcement suffer from significant limitations. Global Patents explains these limitations and presents the solutions that have been proposed to address them. The book includes a thorough comparative analysis of the extraterritorial features of U.S. and German patent laws, and original statistics on U.S. patent litigation. Based on a comprehensive treatment of the various facets of transnational enforcement challenges, the author proposes the next stage of patent law internationalization.

The luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known. This is the first comprehensive study of the sumptuary laws that attempted to regulate the consumption of luxuries. Catherine Kovesi Killerby provides a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than 300 laws enacted in over 40 cities throughout Italy, and sets them in their social context.

Traditional knowledge is largely oral collective of knowledge, beliefs, and practices of indigenous people on sustainable use and management of resources. The survival of this knowledge is at risk due to various difficulties faced by the holders of this knowledge, the threat to the cultural survival of many communities, and the international lack of respect and appreciation of traditional knowledge. However, the greatest threat is that of appropriation by commercial entities in derogation of the rights of the original holders. Though this practice is morally questionable, in the absence of specific legal provisions, it cannot be regarded as a crime. Intellectual Property Rights and the Protection of Traditional Knowledge is a collection of innovative research on methods for protecting indigenous knowledge including studies on intellectual property rights and sovereignty rights. It also analyzes the contrasting interests of developing and developed countries in the protection of traditional knowledge as an asset. While highlighting topics including biopiracy, dispute resolution, and patent law, this book is ideally designed for legal experts, students, industry professionals, and practitioners seeking current research on the development and enforcement of intellectual property rights in relation to traditional knowledge.

This collection of essays was written in honour of David Vaver, who recently retired as Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law and Director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre at the University of Oxford. The essays, written by some of the world's leading academics, practitioners and judges in the field of intellectual property law, take as their starting point the common assumption that the patent, copyright and trade mark laws within members of the 'common law family' (Australia, Canada, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and so on) share some sort of common tradition. The contributors examine, in relation to particular topics, the extent to which such a shared view of the field exists in the face of other forces that are producing divergence. The essays discuss, inter alia, issues concerning court practices, the medical treatment exception, non-obviousness and sufficiency in patent law, originality and exceptions in copyright law, unfair competition law, and cross-border goodwill and dilution in trade mark law.

Media and Entertainment Law is a fast growing sector of practice in the EC, and in the UK in particular. The emergence of multi-media law has raised a large number of novel conceptual and practical difficulties for lawyers specialising in the area. The Yearbook is designed to respond to these practical difficulties while also making a serious contribution to media law as an area of serious academic study. It contains high quality analyses of topical issues, as well as thorough surveys of key areas of practice. Up to date and informative, the Yearbook is now well-established as a key source of information and analysis for all media and entertainment law professionals.

The TRIPS Agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), signed on April 15, 1994, introduced intellectual property protection into the World Trade Organization's multilateral trading system for the first time, and it remains the most comprehensive international agreement on intellectual property to date. A Neofederalist Vision of TRIPS by Graeme B. Dinwoodie and Rochelle C. Dreyfuss examines its interpretation, its impact on the creative environment, and its effect on national and international lawmaking. It propounds a vision of TRIPS as creating a neofederalist regime, one that will ensure the resilience of the international intellectual property system in time of rapid change. In this vision, WTO members retain considerable flexibility to tailor intellectual property law to their national priorities and to experiment with changes necessary to meet new technological and social challenges, but agree to operate within an international framework. This framework, while less powerful than the central administration of a federal government, comprises a series of substantive and procedural commitments that promote the coordination of both the present intellectual property system as well as future international intellectual property lawmaking. Part I demonstrates the centrality of state autonomy throughout the history of international negotiations over intellectual property. Part II, which looks at the present, analyzes the decisions of the WTO in intellectual property cases. It concludes that the WTO has been inattentive to the benefits of promoting cultural diversity, the values inherent in intellectual property, the rich fabric of its law and lore, the necessary balance between producers and users of knowledge goods, and the relationship between the law and the technological environment in which it must operate. Looking to the future, Part III develops a framework for integrating the increasingly fragmented international system and proposes the recognition of an international intellectual property acquis, a set of longstanding principles that have informed, and should continue to inform intellectual property lawmaking. The acquis would include both express and latent components of the international regime, put access-regarding guarantees such as user rights on a par with proprietary interests and enshrine the fundamental importance of national autonomy in the international system.

This work analyses the scope of copyright protection for computer software in the United Kingdom, and examines challenges for the future. The work presents the case for the adoption and application of infringement methodology, emanating from the courts in the United States, resulting in a narrower scope of protection than is presently argued for by many UK academics, practitioners and judges alike. The work makes a careful evaluation of the efficacy of the various prevailing tests for infringement of copyright in software and their progenies, suggesting an improved formula and advocating the utility, of limiting doctrines to assist in the determination of substantial similarity of particular non-literal software elements, user interfaces and screen display protection. The monograph also contains a detailed study of reverse engineering, copyright defences, permitted acts, database protection and the copyright-contract interface in the context of computer software, not omitting crucial discussions of the internet, digital dissemination and the impact of recent treaty, and legislative initiatives on British copyright law. As such it will be an important resource for practitioners, lecturers and students alike.

The long-awaited European Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court will soon become a reality. Companies, research institutions, and individuals will be able to obtain not only a patent title with immediate effect in 25 EU Member States, but also a court decision on (for example) infringement or validity of a European or Unitary patent with effect in the participating Member States. Everybody involved in European patenting will find enormously welcome guidance in this extraordinary book. Written by two outstanding intellectual property experts - one being a lawyer who had a hand in the development of the unitary patent and the other being a reputed Belgian intellectual property judge - it describes in detail all the provisions regarding the new patent and the new court, explaining their rationales and the processes that led to them. Although the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court still need to be finalized and adopted by the Court, the authors already unravel the proposed Draft Rules of Procedure. The book uses flowcharts as well as plain words to represent each procedural stage of the Draft Rules of Procedure. In this way, a practitioner can focus on each distinct stage as required, while also gaining a comprehensive overview of the proceedings. The complex language issues arising throughout the proceedings are analysed in detail in a supplementary part.

Since its passage in 2011, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act ("AIA") has brought many significant changes to U.S. patent law. Accordingly, to assist readers in developing an in-depth understanding of these changes, the America Invents Act Primer provides discussions of each and every one of the AIA's substantive provisions. More specifically, and whenever possible, each discussion of the AIA's provisions includes the following key features: An identification of the AIA section's effective date, including the statutory basis for such dates; A direct comparison of relevant pre- and post-AIA statutes; An analysis of the similarities and differences between pre- and post-AIA statutes; A discussion of the legislative goals that were addressed by the AIA section; and An analysis of the practical implications of the changes made by the AIA section. The America Invents Act Primer additionally highlights a number of free resources that can be utilized by readers to attain a deeper understanding of the AIA, including resources that explain how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is applying the new law. Overall, the America Invents Act Primer provides a unique and practical desk reference on the AIA that is sure to be useful for years to come.

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World is a collection of recent essays offering some fresh perspectives on the scope and future of intellectual property rights. The tripartite division of the book is designed to make this interdisciplinary topic more accessible and intelligible to readers of diverse backgrounds. Part I consists of a single essay that provides a broad overview of the main themes in intellectual property scholarship, such as normative intellectual property theory and the legal infrastructure for property protection. The second section of the book presents several essays that are intended to deepen the reader's understanding of intellectual property theory and show how it can help us to grapple with the proper allocation of property rights in cyberspace. And the final section further develops the themes in Part II but in greater detail and with a more practical orientation. For the most part, the essays in this section illustrate the costs and benefits of applying property rights to cyberspace. While intellectual property rights create dynamic incentive effects, they also entail social costs, and they are sometimes in tension with the development of a robust public domain.

Taking the invention as its object of study, this book develops a radical new perspective on the making of modern patent law. It develops an extended historical and conceptual exploration of the invention in modern patent law. Focussing primarily on the figures that make inventions material, and on how to overcome the intangibility of ideas, this intellectual challenging book makes explicit a dimension of patent law that is not commonly found in traditional commentaries, treatises and cases. The story is told from the perspective of the material media in which the intangible form of the invention is made visible; namely, models, texts, drawings, and biological specimens. This approach brings to light for the first time some essential formative moments in the history of patent law. For example, Figures of Invention describes the central role that scale models played in the making of nineteenth-century patent jurisprudence, the largely mythical character of the nineteenth-century theory that patents texts should function as a means of disclosing inventions, and the profound conceptual changes that emerged from debates as to how to represent and disclose the first biological inventions. At the same time, this historical inquiry also reveals the basic conceptual architecture of modern patent law. The story of how inventions were represented is also the story of the formation of the modern concept of invention, or of the historical processes that shaped the terms in which patent lawyers still apprehend the intangible form of the invention. Although the analysis focuses on the history of patent law in the United States, it develops themes that illuminate the evolution of patent regimes in Europe. In combining close historical analysis with broad thematic reflection, Figures of Invention makes a distinctive contribution both to the field of patent law scholarship and to emerging interdisciplinary debates about the constitution of patent law and of intellectual property in general.

This volume take the reader through the legal and accounting principles that govern the valuation of assets. A crucial problem for legal, accounting, banking and venture capital professionals, it is also important to owners and managers of IP assets.

This book focuses on database law (a branch of intellectual property law) and further explores the legal protection currently available for data and data-related products in India. It offers a comparative study of the position of copyright law in protecting databases in the US and EU, while also presenting responses from the Indian database industry and its aspirations regarding the role of copyright law in database protection. India is undoubtedly leading the way as a knowledge economy. Its strengths are its information technology capability and its knowledge society, as well as its booming database industry - aspects that also necessitate the study of the role of law, as well as the protection of data and databases, in India. This book examines the growing importance of copyright law for protecting databases as well as for ensuring access in information societies. The book concludes with a discussion of key principles to be kept in mind in the context of drafting legal regimes for databases in India that will both benefit the database industry and ensure accessibility.

"Softwars: The Legal Battles for Control of the Global Software Industry" explains why the future of the computer industry depends on the nature and extent of intellectual property protection for the software that controls computer hardware. The softwars it discusses are the confrontations taking place in the courtroom, in the legislative chambers and in professional symposia around the world in which the scope of intellectual property protection for computer software is being debated and, in some cases, determined. In a highly readable and entertaining series of essays, the author explains the influences of clones, hackers, vendors of proprietary systems, vendors of open systems, software patents, copyrights and trade secrets on the evolution of the industry. No other book to date has provided either as lucid a description of the major litigation involving software protection or as cogent an analysis of the economic and strategic consequences of that litigation.

"SoftwarS" is divided into five parts, each consisting of two or more essays. In Part I, the author discusses the nature of computer programs and the history of intellectual property protection for computer programs. Part II deals with the look and feel issue; it explains what constitutes infringement of rights in screen displays and other aspects of user interfaces, and the importance of the issue. Part III concerns the practice known as reverse engineering of software; who does it, why, and what the legal and economic consequences are. In Part IV, the reader is led to the boundaries of the legal debate, where the limits of the law are being tested. Part V is the author's conclusion and prognostications for the future of the computer industry and the law. Anyone interested in the intersection of law and technology, and particularly those involved in the computer industry, will find Softwars valuable and compelling reading.

Metaphors, moral panics, folk devils, Jack Valenti, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, predictable irrationality, and free market fundamentalism are a few of the topics covered in this lively, unflinching examination of the Copyright Wars: the pitched battles over new technology, business models, and most of all, consumers.
In Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, William Patry lays bare how we got to where we are: a bloated, punitive legal regime that has strayed far from its modest, but important roots. Patry demonstrates how copyright is a utilitarian government program--not a property or moral right. As a government program, copyright must be regulated and held accountable to ensure it is serving its public purpose. Just as Wall Street must serve Main Street, neither can copyright be left to a Reaganite "magic of the market."
The way we have come to talk about copyright--metaphoric language demonizing everyone involved--has led to bad business and bad policy decisions. Unless we recognize that the debates over copyright are debates over business models, we will never be able to make the correct business and policy decisions.
A centrist and believer in appropriately balanced copyright laws, Patry concludes that calls for strong copyright laws, just like calls for weak copyright laws, miss the point entirely: the only laws we need are effective laws, laws that further the purpose of encouraging the creation of new works and learning. Our current regime, unfortunately, creates too many bad incentives, leading to bad conduct. Just as President Obama has called for re-tooling and re-imagining the auto industry, Patry calls for a remaking of our copyright laws so that they may once again be respected.

With the WTO TRIPS-Agreement, intellectual property issues have become an integral part of the world trading system. The Agreement probably represents the most significant and controversial development in world trade law. The Agreement is comprehensive in scope and contains standards for protection of a number of intellectual property rights as well as rules on the enforcement of such rights. Furthermore it closely links to the well-established traditional international system of the protection of intellectual property rights - the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization and related agreements, in particular the Paris and Berne Convention and the Madrid Agreement. This commentary covers the entire TRIPS-Agreement. It adopts a comparative perspective in highlighting related and similar provisions and developments in other international and regional instruments, such as the ones mentioned above and, for instance the European Patent Convention. The volume is based on a close cooperation between the Intellectual Property Law Center of the University of Dusseldorf and the Goettingen Institute for International Law and European Law, which aims at bringing together expertise in intellectual property law and and general international law and trade law. It is designed to meet the needs both of the WTO and the intellectual property community.