This collection of essays, sourced from the education and research community, present varying views to the working and interpretations of the UK’s intellectual property laws.

The European Commission adopted a Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy aiming to tackle the important cultural and legal challenges of mass-scale digitisation and dissemination of books, in particular of European library collections. Digital libraries such as Europeana will provide researchers and consumers across Europe with new ways to gain access to knowledge. For...

In this transcript of his Press Club address, Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, looks at the challenges for copyright law. This speech was presented in Canberra on 4 August 2009. The transcript includes the question and answer session after the speech.

The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers...

A pyrrhic victory for the recording industry highlights the need for a rethink of the law, writes Julian Thomas on our partner site, Inside Story.