OUT TODAY! COPYRIGHT AND FREE SPEECH

The IPKat's friends Uma Suthersanen and Jonathan Griffiths teamed up a couple of years ago to run a very enjoyable conference on the topic of Copyright and Free Speech, the result of which is a set of papers that have been edited into a jolly good read. This morning these papers have been most handsomely published by Oxford University Press under the title Copyright and Free Speech: Comparative and International Analyses.

The OUP blurb reads:

"Written by a team of leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of copyright and free speech, this work analyses the potential for interaction and conflict between the two rights".

The IPKat likes this, though modesty prevents him mentioning that co-author Jeremy is one of the contributors (if you want to know what his thoughts are on the relationship of sui generis database right to free speech, you can start reading backwards from the end, since his is the last chapter ...)

The contents are as follows:

Lord Justice Jacob: Preface
1 Jonathan Griffiths and Uma Suthersanen: Introduction

Part A: Mapping the Conflict
2 Eric Barendt: Copyright and free speech theory
3 Fiona Macmillan: Commodification and cultural ownership
4 Wendy Gordon: Copyright norms and the problem of private censorship
5 Uma Suthersanen: Towards an international public interest rule? Human rights and international copyright law

Part B: National Perspectives
6 Neil Netanel: Copyright and the First Amendment
7 Gerald Dworkin: Copyright, the public interest and freedom of speech
8 Kevin Garnett QC: The impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on United Kingdom copyright law
9 Jonathan Griffiths: Not such a 'timid thing' - the UK's integrity right and freedom of expression
10 Ysolde Gendreau: Canadian copyright law and its Charters
11 Robert Burrell and James Stellios: Copyright and freedom of political communication in Australia
12 Alain Strowel and François Tulken: Freedom of expression and copyright under the civil law
13 Mira Sundara Rajan: Copyright and free speech in transition: the Russian experience

Part C: The Digital World
14 Raymond T. Nimmer: First Amendment speech and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: a proper marriage
15 Thomas Dreier: Contracting out of copyright in the Information Society - the impact on freedom of expression
16 Jeremy Phillips: Databases, the Human Rights Act and EU law

Weighing in at 480 pages (inclusive of those at the beginning with Roman numerals, which the IPKat usually skips), this hardback costs £75.00. It's a solid and thoughtful European-originating perspective on a subject once thought to be the sole preserve of US jurisprudence. Go out and buy it.