Overview of content related to 'data'

Book Review: Patent Failure - How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss reviews a work which debunks some key assumptions about IPR and contends that current patent arrangements are ineffective.

Arguments about intellectual property rights (IPR) never go away, particularly now that technological and market changes drive the legal agendas along very fast. Nowhere faster probably than in software and business-methods patents, one of the more colourful aspects of a highly litigious field today. Much of the debate centres on the USA where R&D spending is highest (particularly by big players, who incidentally have the most lucrative and best-defended patents).

Book Review: Copyright Compliance

editor — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss argues that the book's online big sister, Keeping Within the Law (KWtL), launched at the same time, is really the place to go and the source to buy.

Books are not mushrooms and do not grow in the dark: we tend to know they're there and we know the frame within which they work. Copyright Compliance is one in a useful line of books about information law from Paul Pedley and others, published by Facet Publishing (which is owned by CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, formerly The Library Association).

Book Review: Digital Copyright

editor — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss looks at an interesting Nile cruise of a book about intellectual property.

The second edition of Digital Copyright is the print-book counterpart of the original e-book and, as such, will sell particularly well to libraries where training (and self-updating) is taken seriously and to educational establishments where people are trained for 'the profession' (this is so hybrid now that perhaps no one book on information law can satisfy everyone - think of electronic communications law, Internet law, computing law, and the like, and specialist authors like Ian Lloyd on IT law).

Book Review: Essential Law for Information Professionals

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss picks another winner but wonders whether legal essentialism is enough for information professionals.

When you see a retail centre in a town, it is natural to wonder how central it really is : is it merely a claim? So when words like 'essential' appear in book titles, we again wonder whether it is really so. Years of publishers' blurbs and puffs induce irony, especially as we look along shelves of books with similar titles (and claims), above all for students and young professionals - essential psychology, essential statistics, essentials for Continuing Professional Development, essential law.

Book Review: Staying Legal

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss examines an interesting collection of essays and, with reservations, likes the second edition a lot more.

Like climbing Everest, information law is now a highly competitive field. The first edition of this work, edited by Chris Armstrong alone, appeared from Facet in 1999. It reflected the preoccupations of the mid-1990s, captured changing law like Internet regulation and database rights, and showed a growing understanding of information liability and the need properly to interpret contracts.

Book Review: Joining Up the Dots

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Stuart Hannabuss seeks the tenor among the diversity of voices provided by Challenge and Change in the Information Society.

Any work on the information society attracts that ambivalent reaction that it might be trite and it could be seminal. But, with the logic that nothing that becomes cliché can be other than centrally relevant, above all when published by a professional body, (which should know these things), Challenge and change promises well.