Resources of the Week: Intellectual Property — World Tour
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

IANAL.

Most assuredly. And TINLA.

But what we have for you this week, by request, are a few key resources to help you understand intellectual property laws around the world. We highlight particular features that you may find especially interesting and/or useful.

We also suggest checking any good law library website for research guides and other relevant materials. If you happen to work at one and want to share something from your site, please clue us in so we can append it to this article. Just this week, Gary posted a link to a particularly nice collection from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University.

Of course, it only makes sense here to start with:

+ World Intellectual Property Organization

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.

The alphabetical list of Member States is especially valuable because each country name is a live link that takes you to “information on membership of the different WIPO treaties; national IP legislation; contact details of IP Offices; country profile, and more.”

The Collection of Laws for Electronic Access database provides “easy access to intellectual property legislation from a wide range of countries and regions as well as to treaties on intellectual property.”

The Intellectual Property Digital Library “provides access to intellectual property data collections hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization.” And information junkies will want to bookmark the Statistics, Data and Indicators page, which provides links to a motherlode of info on patents, trademarks, designs…and even microorganisms. (Who knew?)
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+ Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute: Copyright offers a collection of links to key international documents in the middle of the lefthand side of the page, including a hypertext version of the seminal Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.
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+ The EU Single Market: Protection of Rights

To create a genuine Single Market in Europe, restrictions on freedom of movement and anti-competitive practices must be eliminated or reduced as much as possible, while creating an environment favourable to innovation and investment. In this context, the protection of intellectual property is an essential element for the success of the Single Market. In our growing knowledge-based economies the protection of intellectual property is important not only for promoting innovation and creativity, but also for developing employment and improving competitiveness.

Intellectual property is divided into two categories: industrial property, which includes inventions, trademarks, industrial design, and geographical indications of source; and copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, films, musical works, paintings, photographs, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

The Copyright and Neighboring Rights page has a extensive list of useful links along the lefthand side. The Protection of Databases link may be of particular interest to information professionals. You’ll also find a collection of documents and studies.
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+ Franklin Pierce Law Center’s IP Mall offers an extensive Directory of World Intellectual Property Associations. This is basically an alphabetical list of more than 400 links. Also here — IP India: Legal Resources for Indian Intellectual Property Advocates and Professionals, a vetted “comprehensive collection of links and resources on intellectual property rights in India.”
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+ GlobaLex, from the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU School of Law, “is committed to the dissemination of high-level international, foreign, and comparative law research tools in order to accommodate the needs of an increasingly global educational and practicing legal world.”

The information and articles published by GlobaLex represent both research and teaching resources used by legal academics, practitioners and other specialists around the world who are active either in foreign, international, and comparative law research or those focusing on their own domestic law. The guides and articles published are written by scholars well known in their respective fields and are recommended as a legal resource by universities, library schools, and legal training courses.

Among the many excellent research guides here — European Union Legal Materials: An Infrequent User’s Guide, by Duncan E. Alford, Associate Dean for Library and Information Services and Associate Professor of Law at Charlotte School of Law, North Carolina. Some further digging around at this site turned up a pointer to a collection of resource links on Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Intellectual Property and Data from the NYU Law Library.
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+ Law Library of Congress: Global Legal Information Network

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) is a public database of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations. These GLIN members contribute the official full texts of published documents to the database in their original language. Each document is accompanied by a summary in English and subject terms selected from the multilingual index to GLIN. All summaries are available to the public, and public access to full texts is also available in participating jurisdictions. To begin searching GLIN, use the search fields below.

If you have a special “interest in legal developments from around the world,” take a look at the Global Legal Monitor newsletter, in PDF format. An archive of past issues (back to May 2006) is available via a dropdown menu.
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+ Lex Mercatoria, which is “hosted by The Law Faculty of the University of Oslo, Norway, in fellowship with The Institute of International Commercial Law, Pace University, School of Law,” bills itself as “One of the VERY First Law Sites on the Web”.

It is dedicated to the provision of information on international commercial law with subsidiary interests in commerce and (mostly open standard) Net and information technologies that may be of interest to law academics and professionals worldwide.

Worth clicking on here, in the Intellectual Property section, is the intriguingly named Alternative Memes link, which aggregates information about open source/open access issues.
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+ UNESCO: Collection of Copyright Laws

This site endeavours to provide access to national copyright and related rights legislation of UNESCO Member States.

The collection currently comprises about 100 laws and is constantly being updated and completed.

To access the laws, you need first to click on the geographical zone you are interested in, then click on the country name.

Simple enough. Be sure to scroll down a bit to find a link to International Standard-Setting Instruments in the Copyright Field, which “provides access to the major international instruments in the field of copyright and related rights.”
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+ U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: International Intellectual Property

For those who wish to seek protection for their intellectual property beyond the borders of the United States of America as well as for those non-US customers who wish to seek patent or trademark protection in the United States of America.

Basically a collection of organized links: organizations, regional organizations, laws & regulations, enforcement, international protection, other references. Digging around here unearthed a link to the International Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Training Database, “maintained by agencies of the United States Government and industry associations who provide training and technical assistance relating to protecting IPR.” Browse or search the database for workshops, meetings, courses, etc. A button. For each entry, a “Contact Sponsor” button displays an online form that makes it easy for you to request information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 2:01 am and is filed under Intellectual Property, Resource of the Week, Search News, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.