Book review: 'Digital Copyright Law and Practice', by Simon Stokes

• Author: Katie Osborne
• Position: Solicitor at Moorcrofts LLP
• Pages: 69-70

Book review: 'Digital Copyright Law and Practice', by Simon Stokes 69

Book review: 'Digital Copyright Law and

Practice', by Simon Stokes

Katie Osbornea

(a) Solicitor at Moorcrofts LLP

DOI: 10. 5033/ifosslr.v6i1.100

Abstract

Katie Hill reviews Digital Copyright Law and Practice, a book which

is due to come out in 2014.

Keywords

Law; information technology; Free and Open Source Software;

intellectual property; copyright; book review

Simon Stokes’s Fourth Edition of Digital Copyright Law and Practice is a fairly comprehensive

explanation on the topic of digital copyright and related areas and contains précises of interesting

(for the most part) and relevant case law and legislation as well as some commentary and practical

examples of how various issues could be addressed in reality.

The opening pages explain that the aim of this book in relation to digital cop yright is “to help

educate rights owners, users and their lawyers of these challenges so that they can better protect

and exploit their copyrights”. To write a book which is designed to guide three groups of people

who are likely to have disparate levels of knowledge and different requirements is a real challenge

and it is unclear why anyone would declare this aim so baldly unless they felt that they had

accomplished it.

Although the precedents and checklists section at the end of the book may prove to be instructive

and useful for both lawyers and their clients (though will clearly need revision with future

developments), I am unconvinced that this book full y achieves its stated aims. The book is also

rather awkward and unwieldy in places. The “rights owners and users” focussed sections may

prove to be irritating for lawyers and it is possible that the lawyer orientated sections will have a

soporific effect on non-lawyers.

The book does, in certain places, go into some depth of explanation on the basics of copyright

(which seems designed for the layman) but fails adequately to cover all bases if its intention is to

start from first principles assuming practically zero knowledge. For example, joint authorship is

rather glossed over and this may lead to confusion when the nuances are later discussed. The text

delves into legislation and case law across the world which is perhaps only really exciting for

lawyers. A little more commentary and discussion on the issues and the views of the author on

how this impacts practice going forwards may be interesting and assist in breaking up these rather

dry law yer-focussed sections. That said, a full text on the basics which also gives deep critical

insight into law and practice would extend this book to a tome of such a size as t o become

International Free and Open Source Software Law Review Vol. 5, Issue 2

70 Book review: 'Digital Copyright Law and Practice', by Simon Stokes

unappealing and a line has to be drawn somewhere.

This, however, is nothing to a major issue which is exemplified by the following statement: “Some

argue that copyright ought not to exist or at least it should be severely limited in its application.

The ‘open source’ or ‘copyleft’ movement discussed later in this book is one example of this”.

Ideally, in that discussion, Mr Stokes would give a further explanation of F/OSS and correct this

statement but alas, the page and a half committed to open source’s “challenge” to software

copyright neither corrects nor clarifies, and the final two page section merely provides a slightly

alarmist checklist for companies considering open source. The fact that in a book dedicated to

digital copyright there are a measly four pages dedicated to open source and a couple of scattered

references seems bizarre. But worse than that, the text misrepresents the F/OSS movement. This

potentially misleads its readers and must be addressed in the fifth edition.

About the author

Katie Osborne is a solicitor at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique technology firm based in Thames

Valley. Katie transferred to Moorcrofts for the final part of her training contract in order to work

under the guidance of Andrew Katz and remained with the firm once she qualified. Katie now acts

for a wide range of clients both based in England and abroad in non-contentious commercial

issues, intellectual property and technology. Katie has recently passed Harvard Law School's

distance learning course on US copyright law and has a particular interest in FOSS and open

hardware and data issues.

International Free and Open Source Software Law Review Vol. 5, Issue 2

Licence and Attribution

This paper was published in the International Free and Open Source Software Law

Review, Volume 6, Issue 1 (December 2014). It originally appeared online at

http://www.ifosslr.org.

This article should be cited as follows:

Osborne, Katie (2014) 'Book Review: Digital Copyright Law and Practice',

International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, 5(2), pp 69 – 70

DOI: 10.3366/ifosslr.v6i1.100

Copyright © 2014 Katie Osborne.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons UK (England and Wales) 2.0

licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC-BY-ND available at

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/uk/

As a special exception, the author expressly permits faithful translations of the entire

document into any language, provided that the resulting translation (which may

include an attribution to the translator) is shared alike. This paragraph is part of the

paper, and must be included when copying or translating the paper.