Book Review: Intellectual Property in the New Millennium

The contributors are 22 specialists, all of them IP practitioners or University level teachers. The volume clearly has an appeal for specialists, but its lucidity will equally render it useful to students and to informed and interested general readers. The subject matter is divided into four sections, namely, general IP, patents and plant protection, trademarks and unfair competition, and copyright and related rights.

The book contains excellent coverage of newer developments in IP at the international level. Contributors show how the latest legal instruments reinforce or add to preceding instruments in their fields-for example, the 1991 revision of the UPOV Convention, and the compliance required by the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement and the WIPO Copyright Treaty with the norms of the much earlier Berne Convention. There are illustrations of the problems involved in the application of the Berne Convention, arising notably from developments in information technology, and from the need for clarification of existing definitions.

Comparative law is well represented in essays which compare the merits of common and civil law systems in Europe and North America. Readers are guided through the difficulties of evaluating whether the twin criteria of satisfactory justice at justifiable cost prevail in common law countries where first instance trials usually conclude cases, or in civil law countries where more appeals are the norm. Another interesting essay weighs the advisability of...