Intellectual Property: Law & The Information Society: Cases & Materials
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Edition
Sixth Edition
Publisher
Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Year of Publication
2024
Pagination
xviii, 799 pages
ISBN
9798334068735
Description
This open textbook is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the four forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright, patent and trade secrecy—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States. The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open, Creative Commons licensed coursebook, which can be freely edited, copied and shared, it is also suitable for undergraduate classes, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class.
The license means that teachers can take only the chapters or excerpts they need, which can be downloaded individually, and do so at no cost. Our goal is to make the book available without regard to students’ ability to pay: the free digital download can be found here. If a tangible copy is preferred, an 8”x10” paperback version is available for $37.35. We hope, though, that the flexibility of the digital downloads—of both individual chapters and the entire book—will be attractive. One of the goals of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain is to offer high quality academic research about intellectual property to the citizens of the world, in accessible formats, at no cost.
Each chapter contains a clear introduction to the field, cases and secondary readings illustrating the structure and conflicts in the theory and doctrine of intellectual property, followed by questions to test the student’s understanding. Chapters are built around a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument, with students asked to take the place of the lawyers, to exercises counseling clients about how search engines and trademarks interact, to discussions of the First Amendment’s application to Digital Rights Management or the Supreme Court’s rulings on gene patents. There is extensive discussion of the theory, history and political economy of intellectual property law. This is a subject that excites widespread and passionate differences of opinion which—at least so far—do not track conventional political leanings at all. That makes it unique and, for us, uniquely fascinating as an academic endeavor. It is also something—like the environment or civil rights—that everyone might want to learn about, whether or not they are lawyers.
Disciplines
Intellectual Property Law | Law
Subjects
Intellectual property, Casebooks
Recommended Citation
James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, Intellectual Property: Law & The Information Society: Cases & Materials (Center for the Study of the Public Domain, 2024)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_books/1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.