The Librarian’s Guide to Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Citation

Eisenschitz, T. (2003), "The Librarian’s Guide to Intellectual Property in the Digital Age", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 59 No. 1, pp. 108-109. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410310458046

This is a slim little book, 170 pages on intellectual property rights (IPRs) for libraries. It looked promising, particularly with the “digital age” in the title.

One, if not the, key issue for digital materials is the structure of property rights differing from country to country and enforced largely with the onus on the user to know all the quirks of a complex set of regimes. A book with this title should, I thought, give me a guide through these national thickets and tell me the regions within which uniformity applies, the key differences between regimes and maybe where enforcement comes down hardest. This does not materialise. The book is about US IPRs only, useful to know when in the USA, but here in the European Union they need to be linked with our own systems.

On its own terms it is a useful little book covering primarily copyrights, patents and trade marks relating to digital materials and library‐related functions like research or fair use copying. The section on trade marks is rather short, but both copyright and patents have a satisfactory length of several chapters of considerable practical outlook.

At the end is a long list of useful questions and answers, a reasonable long list of relevant Web sites on the topics covered and addresses of patent and copyright deposit libraries. If only someone would bring out such useful books on European countries. Perhaps it is the multiplicity of languages which stops us.

The style of each chapter is to go into a lot of detail about the law and the structures that support it and how these are applied in libraries and research organisations.

It is a relatively short book, only 170 pages in total, but direct and to the point – definitely a practitioners’ handbook. Not ideal for students as it is of such narrow focus, but would be ideal as an adjunct to larger, more detailed books.

Overall, a nice little book which fills a niche for those who need to know how the US system works and to be able to use its components in practice.

Given that the publisher is the ALA, this was perhaps to be expected, but the essence of the digital age is the ability to communicate potentially worldwide. It would have been a vastly better book if there had been mention of, and comparison with other major countries and regions.