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25 June 2009 / Alistair Kelman
Issue: 7375 / Categories: Features
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Against Intellectual Monopoly

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Against Intellectual Monopoly: Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine

Thirty years ago the ordinary lawyer did not need to know about copyright save perhaps in the trite phrase “Copyright protects the form in which an idea is presented but not the idea itself”. Copyright issues were left to a specialist IP Bar of which I was then a member. Today copyright issues arise in the day to day work of a commercial solicitor. But while there are balanced practitioners textbook for every other field the main practitioners textbooks (Copinger & Skone James on Copyright   ISBN: 9781847031280 and The Modern law of Copyright and Designs ISBN: 9781405717984) both fail to genuinely set out the law and the intellectual arguments in a comprehensive and sensible form.  Written by practitioners in specialist IP chambers they are a history of the world written by the victors.
Partly this is a consequence of the English legal systems’ requirement that the loser pays the other side’s costs—so English judges never have the benefit of any amicus curiae briefs to assist the court

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