Recent publications

Issues five and six of the 2010 series of Sweet & Maxwell's European Copyright and Design Reports (ECDR) have both now been published, within days of one another. Cases reported include the recent England and Wales Chancery Division decision on summary judgment for copyright infringement in Allen v Bloomsbury and Rowling (noted by this blog here), the Irish High Court ruling in EMI and others v UPC on the availability of injunctive relief against internet service providers (noted here) and the Court of Justice ruling in the Dali resale rights case (noted here).

The fourth and final issue of Sweet & Maxwell's Intellectual Property Quarterly (IPQ) for this year features "The Centrality of Architecture in Copyright Law" by the University of Exeter's James G. H. Griffin -- the architecture in question being that of Lessig rather than Wren or Palladio: "the way the world is, or the way specific aspects of it are".  Indeed ...

Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel have a highly challenging and lively essay, Imagine there's no copyright and no cultural conglomerates too (you can download it here at no cost). Joost, who is Research Fellow, Research Group Arts & Economics at the Utrecht School of the Arts, explains,

"I just became aware of your interesting blog 1709. Three centuries after this event my co-author and I analyse that it is time to get rid of this tool called copyright. As mentioned in the title of the book, we should also reduce the size of cultural conglomerates that dominate markets substantially, by using revitalised anti trust policies. It does not make sense to approach the question of IP rights isolated from the question whether markets are level playing fields or not. What Queen Anne did [in 1709] was to avoid that book markets would be level playing fields. Now, it's time to reverse this trend". 

Not content with abolishing copyright, the authors dismantle patents too. For those who enjoy vigorous assertion, provocative claims, enthusiastic generalisations and a perspective based largely on the writings of some distinguished radical academic commentators on intellectual property, this is a must-read document.

"The body corporate as author of a copyright protected work" is a Current Intelligence case note by Ankur Gupta on the recent Singapore decision in Pioneers & Leader (Publishers) Ltd v Asia Pacific Publishing Pte Ltd [2010] SGHC 211.  It'll be published in the hard-copy version of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice next year, but the online version has been available since last week. You can read it here on the jiplp weblog. This decision expanded the scope of authorship under Singapore's copyright law, holding that there is nothing in principle to prevent an incorporated body being deemed the author of a copyright protected work.