Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

We received our order in 2-3 days in new condition. We are taking a class so I ordered early assuming that it would take longer. To my suprise, we already have our new books in half the time for almost half the price. Great buy!!

This book is an excellent first place to go for people wanting a foundational knowledge of Intellectual Property. In addition to the basics it provides surprisingly comprehensive overview of the three major areas of IP. Making this book an excellent one, and not just a very good one, it also discusses trade secrets. As with most books on Intellectual Property, there is little in the book about who owns patents, how one can transfer ownership to another party, or how one can inadvertantly lose ownership. Overall, though, an excellent book for its stated purpose.

This book is easy-to-use and highly detailed with an appealing, bulleted layout and many illustrations that helped to answer most of my basic questions about the four categories of intellectual property (copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets). I took a graduate-level library science course on the legal aspects of information and borrowed several books on IP from the library. This Nolo Press book was the one that I kept coming back to and wound up buying. I was glad I waited for the updated 7th edition, which now includes an index. The book is divided into completely logical sections on definitions, statutes, forms and an overview, all of which make this book a joy to read. The text is written in plain English and the entries are cross-referenced and other resources are given. This is a legal book written by lawyers, but the legalese is edited out and only very useful information remains. If you need one basic legal reference book on IP, this is the one you'll keep reaching for.

Having worked in the field of intellectual property for over 30 years and as an attorney, I was interested to see what other attorneys would decide to put into a desk reference on the subject. I was pleasantly surprised.Most business people I meet have a minimal understanding of intellectual property law. As a result, they make fundamental errors that could be easily avoided with a simple foundation in the law. But I didn't know of any place where they could get such a foundation until I read this excellent reference guide.Many law students would probably also like to have a simple reference to give them a background in the subject before they start taking courses in the subject. Most attorneys also do not have any law school training in the subject, and they will also benefit from using this reference.I was particularly impressed that the cost was modest for a legal reference.The basic subjects are trade secrets, copyright, patent and trademark law. In all but patent law, a lay person can make many of the right moves in establishing rights without too much legal help. Patent law requires legal guidance in most areas, but a lay person can also avoid mistakes by understanding some of the common pitfalls that people fall into. I was particularly pleased to see that trade secrets were covered well. Most business people do not realize that trade secret protection is often superior to that of copyrights, patents and trademarks. But you have to follow the rules, or your trade secret isn't going to be considered one. I only find about one business person in a hundred who is familiar with these rules.Most people will also improve their copyright protection by following this guide.In patents, it's very important to document what you've been doing, and I found those references to be very well done.As to trademarks, most people misunderstand what can be trademarked and this book clears that point up quite well.So think of this book as more than a self-help guide and less than a legal horn book. Naturally, the intricacies of appellate cases aren't fully exposed, but there's enough here to raise fundamental issues in your mind. In each area, you will see sample forms and documents along with directions for how to obtain and file them.Nolo also offers an on-line reference that updates the material in this book, so you don't have to take out an extra subscription like most legal sources require.In doing your legal planning, be sure to look at the guide on pages 9-11 to see what forms of intellectual property protection may be available to you. That guide is worth the price of the book alone.I was also impressed by the extensive definitions in each subject area. Be sure to read through them all. Without a legal background, you won?t know what you don?t know unless you check these out. Naturally, the primary statutes are also included, for those who do not know how to look them up. People who are new to these subjects will also benefit from the m

In any profession, you'll generally find two sorts of practitioner: the "elitist" and the "populist". The former looks with disdain on customers/users/clients, the latter wants to inform and empower them. In computer programming, for example, the elitists are the "data priests" who think of users as somehow subhuman and refuse to design interfaces that ordinary human beings can operate or even make sense of. The populists are people like Guido van Rossum, developer of the eminently usable programming language Python (and yes, that's a plug). There are elitists in the legal profession too, who don't want people to rely on self-help or even to know what the law actually is. Their arguments are usually couched in terms of protecting the public (who, although this is never quite stated explicitly, are presumed to be just too stupid and ignorant to make informed, intelligent decisions without lawyers to tell them they're wrong). But the effect -- as with any legally protected cartel -- is simply to close off the legal profession to anyone who hasn't got enough time and money to jump through the hoops, thereby jacking up attorneys' fees. That's where Nolo Press comes in. I like Nolo a lot; for thirty years they've been doing business in direct opposition to "legal elitism", by trying to bring reliable legal information directly to their customers and, if not always obviating the need for an attorney, at least giving people a solid foundation for _deciding_ whether to pay for a lawyer. Indeed, their website contains a lot of useful information that you can get _free_; I can't post the URL here but it's "nolo" with the usual suffix. And I think highly of the sixth edition of their desktop reference on intellectual property law. I'm forty years old and in my fourth year of law school, specializing in IP law, and with a couple of misgivings to be stated shortly, I think this is a fine, fine reference. It covers the four major areas of intellectual property law: trade secrets, copyrights, patents, and trademarks. There's one big section devoted to each of these areas; each section includes a short introductory discussion in Q & A format, a big fat alphabetical glossary, and the actual text of the relevant (federal) statutes. The discussion is clear and intelligible, and the sixth edition is updated with up-to-the-minute accounts of stuff on which the ink is barely dry -- the latest on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example, and the Supreme Court's March 2003 decision in the _Victoria's Secret_ trademark dilution case. This isn't just a nice self-help reference; it's a volume that law students could probably profit from. (And so could reporters who presume to _write_ on technology law for newspapers and magazines.) The glossaries alone will be helpful in making sense of the sometimes bewildering jargon of IP law. The one real oversight I spotted is its failure to deal with state-level "common law copyright" in unfixed works, one of the few