Information Law in Practice (2nd ed.)

This is a valuable addition to the literature as it is written for those in information management rather than for lawyers and yet it goes into a lot of detail about the applicable law. It is the second edition of a book published in 1991.There have been many developments in this time span in copyright, data protection and defamation. The Internet has introduced many issues and both the UK and the European Union have been active in law making. Therefore, most parts of the original book have undergone substantial changes.

The contents are quite comprehensive in information law though the amount of space and detail given to each topic does not always seem to me to be equitable.

At the start, an introductory chapter explains the areas of law being covered, some ideas about civil courts, civil actions and their criminal counterparts. Also, sources of law, the law in Scotland and alternative dispute resolution are covered. These are valuable scene‐setting chapters.

The bulk of attention is given to copyright; its basic principles and then details for printed works, works of entertainment and artistic works. Usefully, there is a chapter on a variety of other countries’ copyright laws, one on patents and other forms of industrial property and transnational protection of intellectual property as a whole.

There is a single chapter on electronic data which covers copyright, including the protection of software and of databases, and also data protection and freedom of information, Internet law and electronic commerce. It includes a collection of laws, but little sense of the development of a whole new relationship with information as a digital medium or of the practicalities of access and use in these conditions.

Then there is a chapter of general legal cautions covering defamation, official secrets, confidential information and various free speech and censorship issues. There is some overlap with the electronic data chapter here.

The final chapter is on the future, which looks at some currently newsworthy issues, in particular various Internet access and development issues, the human rights agenda and the controversy over pharmaceutical companies profiteering over their patents for AIDS drugs. This is a very important issue and could well have been generalised to discuss the value of knowledge and its proper place in the Web of commerce.

The book as a whole covers a huge range of topics, and each individual topic covers a very small space. It is more of a reference work than a self contained text book as there is not enough room for a lot of the fiddly details that contain the essence of information law as all other forms of law. However, there are also some surprisingly large omissions. In a book written supposedly for information managers, the emphasis is neverthless on the letter of the law and the immediate manipulations of rightsholders.

For instance, under patenting there is nothing on the uses made of patent information such as statistical analyses of groups of documents to bring up key companies or inventors or the countries with most filings in a particular topic. There is also no mention that researchers use equivalent patent documents to provide informal translations of the text and that the spread of equivalents gives the extent of the proposed market for a product.

For trade marks there is only a very passing mention of the desire to use the trade marked name, well known and associated with a product by advertising, in the Internet domain name associated with that product or range of products. Indeed cybersquatting, the use of names popular in another context and with another organisation or person, is labelled as marginal to the interests of this book. It is clearly an information and ecommerce‐related activity and so should be regarded as central to modern information law.

Under copyright, though the essential law is present, there is little illustration or concentration on relevant information aspects. For instance, the Berne Convention introduced the three‐step‐test for deciding on legitimate exemptions from copyright to allow for the public interest in copying. It is not mentioned, despite its importance for fair dealing/fair use provisions, currently controversial in deciding upon electronic copying rights. It seems to me essential to take intellectual property cases beyond the confines of the pure law if they are to be truly useful to practitioners. These issues apply outside of IPRs, but to a proportionately lesser extent.

To sum up, this is a valuable reference book, useful for having so many aspects of information law in one place. For practitioners it provides a useful summary, but it is not a text book, being too brief and legalistic. There are not enough practical examples of information related use, and references to electronic resources are parcelled up into a side category rather than taking central stage as the defining characteristic of the developing information age.