World Patent Information 31 (2009) 66–68

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

World Patent Information

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/ locate/worpat in

Book reviews

Understanding and profiting from intellectual property: a guidefor practitioners and analysts, Deli Yang. Palgrave (2008), 309pp.,£55, Hardback, ISBN: 978 1 4039 9172 0

The author, a Reader in International Business at Bradford Uni-versity, has written this book as a guide for how to profit fromIntellectual Property in a global business context. This is an ambi-tious aim for a 12 chapter book. It starts promisingly, with a clearguide to the structure of the book and how it should be ap-proached. Sadly, though, it fails to live up to its promise.

The book is a curious mixture of general overview and scholarlymaterial. Two chapters include material that appear to be drawnfrom research articles or thesis chapters, with results of statisticaltests that a general business reader would not understand. Otherchapters are much more general, but show a lot of confusion.Mostly, the author refers to patents, but sometimes switches tocovering other types of Intellectual Property. Readers with someknowledge of the subject will be confused by the worrying lackof understanding of some of the basics of Intellectual PropertyRights demonstrated in the book.

On patents, and of direct relevance to readers of this journal, thebook totally overlooks the bargain that a patent involves, i.e., that theinventor must disclose all that is known about the invention before itcan gain the monopoly. The difference between Registered andunregistered Trade Marks is not made clear, nor is the distinction be-tween Copyright (the right to authorise or prevent copying) andMoral Rights (the right to object to derogatory treatment of the workand the right to be identified as the author). The author indicates thatdomain names are protected by copyright when in fact they are cov-ered by trade mark law. The author claims in two different placesthat IP rights are time-limited, even though she had already correctlynoted that Trade Marks have a potentially indefinite lifetime. Theauthor refers to ‘‘applications for copyright protection”, when asshe has noted elsewhere, there is no application process as copyrightis automatic. It is claimed that ‘‘licensing deals to commercialisesoftware are both simpler and cheaper” without explaining simplerand cheaper than what, and why. Indeed, the book does not explainsoftware patents well; readers would be better advised to read PhilipLeith’s Software and Patents in Europe (Cambridge University Press)for guidance on this topic. It is also stated that Microsoft ‘‘tends to of-fer free copies of software that is nearing the end of its intellectualproperty protection”. But the company was only founded in the1970s, so its first copyrights won’t expire till the late 2020s! Thecomment that Yahoo is one of Google’s ‘‘main competitors in theIP competition” is both poor English and meaningless.

doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2008.09.001

Inventing Digital Television: The Inside Story of a TechnologyRevolution, Martin L Bell. London Press, GB (2007). ISBN: 978-1-905006-21-2

Even more serious are two major errors. The author states ‘‘InBritain, for instance, the requirement for copyright protection isto lodge a copy in the British library and ‘Copyright�owner Year’must be clearly shown on published works (Yang 2003)”. The firstpart of the sentence regarding lodging a work with the British Li-brary (incidentally, not ‘‘British library” as the author states) wastrue 100 years ago, but has long ceased to be a requirement forthe purposes of copyright (although there is still a separate legalrequirement for the deposit of published works at the British Li-brary); the second part of the sentence, regarding the copyrightnotice, has never been true.

The second major error is that the author gets the definitions ofsole and exclusive licence the wrong way round. This is exception-ally worrying coming from a book devoted to IPR, and severelydamages the book’s credibility.

The author notes that IP is of interest to economists, finance,taxation, etc., but fails to note the great interest of library andinformation science in the topic. Several chapters present detailedcomparisons between IP regimes in the USA and in China; the levelof detail presented is unlikely to be of interest to the target audi-ence. Benchmarking is said to be the same as reverse engineering,which it most certainly is not. It is also suggested that it is not pla-giarism ‘‘if the user’s work has demonstrated creativity, in otherwords, added value to a piece of copyrighted work”. Plagiarism iscopying someone else’s work without attribution. It makes no dif-ference if further original words are used or not.

What about patent bibliometrics and patent information? Pat-ent information gets no mention at all, and patent bibliometricsgets a couple of passing mentions, both of which are superficialand uninformative.

The book is well typeset and laid out, though one URL had an extra‘‘/” incorrectly inserted. There are indeed the elements of a worth-while book for managers of IPR in this text. However, because ofthe numerous errors and confusing statistical analyses it cannot berecommended even for them. There are better books for managers,such as Knight’s Patent Strategy, and Smith and Parr’s Valuation ofIntellectual Property and Intangible Assets available. Readers of WorldPatent Information will also find the cursory treatment of the use ofpatent information for competitive intelligence annoying.

Charles OppenheimDepartment of Information Science, Loughborough University,

Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU,United Kingdom

E-mail address: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk

The author was a TV producer who became heavily involvedwith digital TV research and thus is well qualified to chart thetransformation from the limited channel low definition analog

TV systems of the 1960’s to the present large scale implementationof high definition digital TV with hundreds of channels. From thetechnical point of view this is a consequence of the rapidly increas-ing capacity of modern electronics, e.g. computing, telecommuni-cations, signal processing, data compression etc. and theintensive R and D efforts which applied them to implementing costeffective digital TV. The author explains this in considerable depthwhich I (an electrical engineer) found fascinating but he writes in amanner which should be comprehensible to most readers. How-ever, engineering is never solely concerned with technical matters;in this case the commercial possibilities of huge profits were par-amount with the added complication of national governmentswith their own agendas. The present outcomes were a product ofthese technical, commercial and political factors and the author

has dealt with this interaction on a world wide basis in the firsthalf of the book, concentrating on GB thereafter as it is ahead ofthe field in many respects. In my opinion he has dealt with a verybroad subject with considerable skill to produce a fascinating his-tory. I could not put it down.

Although the field is heavily covered by IPR, especially patents,there are only passing references in the book. Given the money tobe made the litigation has already started but this is a subject foranother publication.

Brian Spear36 Starling Close, Buckhurst Hill,

Essex, IG9 5TN, UKE-mail address: brian_spear31@hotmail.com

doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2008.08.006

Trademarked: A History of Well-known Brands, from Aertex toWright’s Coal Tar, David Newton. Sutton Publishing Stroud, UK(2008). 372 pp., Hardback, £20, ISBN: 978-0-7509-4590-5

Although patents, patent information and patenting have beenat the forefront of my very many years in the industrial propertyscene, I have always found trademarks, and especially the historyof trademarks, fascinating. I was accordingly very pleased to re-ceive a review copy of this attractive book.

The book has a brief introduction, then the main ‘meat’ of thebook follows – the trademarks and descriptions, set out in alpha-betical company name order within each of eight chapters coveringtransport, clothing, drinks, food, household goods, agricultural,horticultural and industrial merchandise, medicines and toiletries,and pastimes. The book finishes with an eight page bibliography,and an index.

The author has thoroughly researched a large number of famousand interesting brands, many originating in the 19th century. Agood number of the corresponding early trademark registrationsare still in force. The book essentially consists of a large numberof pen pictures of the companies, their brands and their trademarks,including information on such areas as the companies’ founders,their factories, the products and, where relevant, correspondingpatents.

The ensuing four summaries of entries in this book illustrate thetype of information provided.

Shell petroleum. Formed in 1897, the Shell Transport and TradingCompany applied for its first UK trademark (233,532) in 1900, anasymmetric shell. Soon after they changed this to the more attrac-tive pectin or scallop shape, and filed further trademark registra-tions as the shape evolved through to today’s symmetrical, moresymbolic shape. The Shell brand is valued at $3 billion.

Bass beer. A well known brand, especially in the UK, is famous forits red triangle trademark – being the first mark registered when theUK Trademark Registry opened for business in 1876. No. 1 is still reg-istered, over 130 years later – an indicator of the value of this trade-mark to Bass & Co and its successor companies. Another sign of itsfame was the presence of bottles of Bass beer, identified by the redtriangle, in the painting by Edouard Manet of ‘A bar at the Folie-Bergères’, a colour illustration of which is included in the book.

Pond’s Extract. This healing fluid was originally prepared in1846 by Theron Pond from hazel bark, with the help of an Ameri-can Indian medicine man. The company later moved to New Yorkand set up a British company in London. The latter registered a pic-torial, countryside trademark in 1876. Illustrated in the book arethe original trademark, its use in the packaging of the extract inthe 1930s, and a more modern scene in colour on a boat in anadvertisement of the 1950s.

Bessemer’s Steel. Henry Bessemer was born in 1813, and in-vented a number of industrial processes and improvements, infields such as glass making and sugar refining. Most famouslythough he invented the process for making steel by blowing airthrough the molten steel to remove carbon and developed a tiltingfurnace to further improve the steel making process. This section isillustrated by his tilting furnace trademark and one of his patentsrelating to the process.

Although the book focuses on brands that are famous in the UK,quite a few are well known around the world.

The book is the result of many years of painstaking research bythe author through Trademark Journals and numerous othersources.

The strengths of this book lie in the fascinating stories wovenaround each product, company and trademark, together with themarvellous and extensive range of illustrations of the trademarksthemselves, advertisements using the trademarks, and related pat-ents. The illustrations are not numbered but must exceed 400,mostly in black and white, with a few colour plates. The trade-marks themselves, as mentioned before often dating from the late19th century, give fascinating insights into the perceptions and

Book reviews / Food Chemistry 31 (2009) 66–68 67