The National Treatment Requirements of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions [Part 2]

States are constantly engaged in the process of revising or amending their copyright laws to cope with the pressures of new technologies and the demands of various classes of persons or entities who wish to acquire new rights over copyright works. Since most states are now parties to either or both the Revised Berne Convention (RBC) and the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), they are aware that any reform of their laws must comply with the obligations imposed by these Conventions. Currently the United States, which is bound only by the UCC, is considering what changes may be necessary to its law in order that it may accede to the RBC and thus gain the improved international protection provided by the latter Convention. In all such cases, an important preliminary question states must face is: how far are they bound to extend the benefit and protection of their copyright law in favour of other members of either Convention

Intellectual Property: the State of the Art

This is an address which was presented by Professor David Vaver at Victoria University of Wellington on 30 August 2000. Professor David Vaver was brought to New Zealand by the New Zealand Law Foundation as the Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2000. This address is based on an inaugural lecture delivered on 17 May 2000, at the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford and published as "Intellectual Property: The State of the Art" (2000) 116 LQR 621.  VUWLR is grateful to the Law Quarterly Review for allowing republication of this address

Intellectual Property Today: Of Myths and Paradoxes

It is often claimed or assumed that intellectual property laws are necessary to encourage individual creativity and inventiveness and that society would be worse off without such laws. This article suggests that, in the field of copyrights and patents at least, such claims rest on myth and paradox rather than proof, and should be viewed sceptically. With its minimal standards for eligibility, copyright today seems less concerned with authors, art and literature than with protecting the distributors of standardized industrial products, and sometimes is even used to prevent the dissemination of knowledge by becoming a tool of censorship. Patent law too requires major rethinking if its promise of bettering mankind by encouraging socially useful discoveries and inventions and the dissemination of knowledge is to be realized. The article concludes that intellectual property laws should no longer be analyzed in terms of outmoded notions of property: more particularistic inquiries are needed to ensure that these laws adequately serve valid social ends

Chocolate, Copyright, Confusion: Intellectual Property and the Supreme Court of Canada

This lecture scans how the Supreme Court has been interpreting Canada’s intellectual property laws and how its decisions may affect legislative policy. The Court has become more interested and competent in this field than was the case even a couple of decades ago. The approach in two decisions of the Court, Compo Co. Ltd v. Blue Crest Music Inc. (1979) and Euro-Excellence Inc. v. Kraft Canada Inc. (2007) is particularly compared. Compo contains propositions which unintendedly cast a baneful influence over later law, while Kraft sees the Court split four ways in a case where copyright law was used unsuccessfully to attempt to block parallel imports of chocolate bars into Canada. The lecture concludes that such decisions, among others, expose how inadequately successive governments have monitored intellectual property law developments. It calls for an independent commission to develop a more coherent intellectual property code that will advance Canadian economic interests and be readily understood by its users

Need Intellectual Property Be Everywhere? Against Ubiquity and Uniformity

Intellectual property is more prevalent in every corner of our working and leisure lives. International pressure, through both bilateral treaties and multilateral treaties is causing intellectual property law to standardize at high levels throughout the world. Legal standardization may be beneficial in general but is not so for intellectual property in either the developed or the developing world. The law in developed countries is currently incoherent and itself requires major reconsideration. The imposition of such a defective law on the developing world is helpful to neither side. The paper argues that current intensification and harmonization trends are therefore undesirable, and that retrenchment and diversity in intellectual property law are preferable strategies for both developed and developing countries

The 14th Annual Sir Hugh Laddie Lecture - Mr. Justice Laddie and His Intellectual Property Cases: Of Millefeuilles and a Fish Called Elvis

For me, it was a trip through the judgments of a master craftsman who could succinctly summarize the dispute before him; weigh the conflicting evidence; say what rang true and what did not; state the applicable law, often from first principles set in their historical and policy context; and end by saying who won and lost and what to do. Copyright law might be over-strong , as he suggested in a 1996 lecture;14 but when he had to decide whether a TV documentary critical of cheque-book journalism could freely use another channel\u27s footage to make its point, Laddie J. said his job was to interpret, not supplement, the law: courts had no general wide discretion . . . to refuse to enforce copyright where they believe such refusal to be fair and reasonable. In the 1980s, he had appeared as counsel for the Registrar of Trade Marks to argue successfully against Coca-Cola\u27s attempts to register its distinctive bottle as a trademark to get what every trader craves: potentially perpetual protection.20 The bottle wasn\u27t art (except perhaps to Andy Warhol); it had nothing patentable about it; and the registration for its design, though new in 1925, had expired in 1940. Trademark law does not rush in where other IP fears to tread