GREAT IP DEBATE CONTINUES

IP: the great debate continues

Anglo-American publisher Edward Elgar is publishing intellectual property books more quickly than the IPKat can read them these days. The latest tome to fly across the path of his vision is The Intellectual Property Debate: Perspectives from Law, Economics and Political Economy, edited by Meir Perez Pugatch, Lecturer in Law at the University of Haifa, Israel.

What the publisher says:

"Intellectual property (IP) has become one of the most influential and controversial issues in today’s knowledge-based society. This challenging book exposes the reader to key issues at the heart of the public debate now taking place in the field of IP. It considers IP at the macro level where it affects such issues as international trade policy, ownership of breakthrough technologies, foreign direct investment, innovation climates, public–private partnerships, competition rules and public health where it is strongly embedded in contemporary business decision making.

Meir Pugatch (left) has assembled an international and diverse cast of contributing authors, who offer new insights into a broad span of the most pressing IP-related issues. They shed light on the increasing dominance of IP in the design and execution of basic and applied research, the evaluation of intangible assets, and the protection and management of knowledge assets, underscoring its importance in relation to national economic development strategies and business strategies of knowledge-based industries and companies".

What the IPKat says: It's a funny sort of debate, really, when everyone is saying their own thing in their own language, as it were, without actually engaging each other. What this book (and it's not the only one) needs is for each author to get a chance to read what everyone else has written. Then he or she gets a bit at the end of each chapter where comments can be added, like "this works for economists, but it's meaningless in legal terms" or "this argument's entirely logical; shame about the premises, though". Apart from providing endless hours of fun for readers, it would also make contributors far more careful about what they write. Despite this, it's a lovely little book which is full of telling points. Read it and you won't be disappointed.

Bibliographical details: 2006 xiv + 374pp. Hardback, ISBNs 1 84542 038 1 and 13 978 1 84542 038 3. Price £89.95 (£71.96 from the publisher's website). Rupture factor - negligible. "Couldn't put it down" factor - Parts III and IV are the most gripping (see here for Table of Contents).