Wednesday whimsies

Having drawn the attention of readers to the PressTV production on the police, the press and phone hacking on Monday here, the Kat can also recommend that they take a look at Four Corners' "Bad News", here on ABC (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), which the IPKat's friend Mary-Ellen Field (Brand Licensing) describes as "definitive".

Another friend of the IPKat, copyright scholar and musicologist Andreas Rahmatian (University of Glasgow), sent him " Intellectual Property and the Concept of Dematerialised Property" earlier this year, this being a chapter of a book, Modern Studies in Property Law, edited by Susan Bright and published by Hart Publishing (you can get details of this book here). The IPKat is pleased to say that Andreas has placed this chapter on SSRN here, to enhance access to it.  Having read it, the IPKat warns readers that this is a piece of genuine legal theory and not a how-to-do-it piece for practitioners. It is also a piece that does not pander to the prejudices of Anglo-Saxons or purveyors of Hohfeldian analysis of jural relations. In fact, if you think you know what reality is, read this article and prepare to be challenged!


Around the weblogs. The 37th in the long-running soap opera that is PatLit's PCC Pages series assesses whether IPOff has complied with the judge's order to disclose documents to the claimant Cautious Co, here. If you never knew about the US termination right, a post by the 1709 Blog's Aurelia J. Schultz will help you.  Tomorrow (Thursday 1 September) is National No Music Day in Nigeria, as Kingsley Egbuonu reports on Afro IP.  Over in India, a guest post from Tania Sarcar relates how poor old John Doe is at the receiving end of yet another court order, this time for illegally broadcasting or streaming 'The Bodyguard'.


What the naughty Kat found. Tidying his office, this Kat found a couple of very worthy intellectual property books that were published last year and which he should have reviewed when they first arrived. While it's a bit late to review them now, he can at least draw them to the attention of his readers and confirm that there's plenty in them for the discerning IP practitioner, student or enthusiast. They are

• European Trademark Law: Community Trademark Law and Harmonized National Trademark Law under the powerful triple-authorship of Tobias Cohen Jehoram, Constant van Nispen and Tony Huydecoper. This is a confident, authoritative explanation of law which will throw the English reader into a panic since, while the book is written in English and the title refers to "harmonized national trademark law", it's not about the English experience of trade marks in Europe at all. The authors are (despite the quality of their English) Dutch and the text is written from a Dutch perspective. Thus the introduction is followed, not by a review of Euro-generalisations, but by a description of the statutory basis for Benelux law.  The Belgians shouldn't think that this is all about their legal heritage though: in the table of jurisprudence, Belgian cases are listed under 'Foreign Courts'. The book's web page is here.
  
  
• Trademarks and Unfair Competition (8th edition), by David C. Hilliard, Joseph Nye Welch II and Uli Widmaier.  This is a whopper of a case book, which has a high-risk rupture factor (the publishers gave up numbering the pages after they got to 990). Each edition of this much-loved collection gets a bit more daring than its predecessor: this one has a fresh new chapter on that awkward interface between freedom of speech and those "terrible twins", trade marks and unfair competition, together with some timely and helpful material on the rights of foreign trade mark owners in the US and the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the US courts. Internet and e-lawyers will be pleased with coverage of Federal Trade Commission and Food and Drug Administration developments addressing deceptive advertising and online marketing schemes.  The book's website is here.