This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials “as such” to consider also (a) the availability...

In this article I review the UK and Australian law of compilation copyright in the light particularly of the Australian Full Federal Court's decisions in Desktop Marketing Systems (2002) and IceTV (2008). I criticize the Court's approach in those cases to the issues of both subsistence and...

In this article I consider the questions at the heart of copyright: what is a work and the extent of protection which copyright confers? In so doing I make two central arguments. The first is for an understanding of copyright works oriented around authorial intent, and the second is for a...

This article contains a study of the literary work within Anglo-Australian copyright law. The first part considers the principles governing literary copyright, including the distinction between literary and non-literary works, and the requirements for substantiality, material form, originality...

This Chapter considers the European conception of the authorial works protectable by copyright, and the approach of the Court of Justice to determining whether an authorial work exists. To that end, it distinguishes three legal issues: the meaning of the term “authorial work”, the essential...

This article considers the appropriate method for assessing substantive principles of European patent law, including limits on European patentability. In the argument made, European patent law is a crowded house in which “substantive convergence” around principles is inevitable but...

Section 39(1) of the Patents Act 1977 governs the ownership of inventions devised by employees in the course of their employment. Introduced ‘to codify in a few lines the accumulated common law experience’ prior to 1977, it does not expressly differentiate between employment fields, and has...

In 2009, in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords held that the contribution to the art for which a European patent is granted is the invention. If this is true, we need a robust and meaningful definition of what constitutes an invention, and an understanding of how individual subject matter...

The vast majority of inventions are devised by employees, raising the question who is entitled to patent them? Under the UK Patents Act 1977, the right to patent an invention lies primarily with its inventor(s). However, an exception exists for employee inventions to which section 39(1) applies....