The book's subtitle is “A guide to exploiting and protecting your organization's intellectual assets”, and that is a pretty accurate summary of what the book sets out to do. It has 17 short, punchy chapters, very much written in management speak, together with an appendix that summarizes the main Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), and a limited index. The publisher is British, the references are to UK law, yet the spelling is American, which I suppose reflects where the main sales of this book are expected to be.
The book is based on the author's experience in the identification, management and exploitation of IPRs (especially patents, to a lesser extent trademarks and to a surprisingly limited extent copyright) in industry. He provides an interesting introduction to the tools he has used for identification, valuing and exploiting such rights, and gives guidance on licensing rights to and from third parties. The book is full of common sense and interesting tips. It is such a pity, therefore, to report that this interesting, well written and useful material is spoiled by a number of deficiencies.
Very few references to further reading are supplied, and some of those appear to be unpublished reports, and others give so little bibliographic information that it would be impossible to track down the item in question. The claim that “The role of patents is typically to provide a monopoly for the licensee when exploiting licensed know‐how” is grammatically weird and is in any case an incorrect description of the main use of patents. The author's claim that “patents rarely produce a license income” is pure speculation, as the vast majority of patent licences are kept confidential.
The author assumes the readers have a lot of prior knowledge, for example of the Balanced Scorecard technique and Discounted Cash Flow, and name drops evaluation techniques without explaining them properly. Chapter 8, on Knowledge Management (KM), shows in parts a deep lack of understanding of what KM is and in other parts grossly oversimplifies things. The author's recommended wording for claiming copyright in corporate documents is legally invalid, and his claim that “if the research is carried out for commercial reasons, they are no longer exempt from copyright law” shows real ignorance of copyright law. The statement about what constitutes patent infringement is similarly inaccurate. The description of the pros and cons of outsourcing patent and trademark prosecution is oversimplified. His claim that one can predict when a patent will be granted is nonsense.
The author correctly recommends Knight's book Patent Strategy, but gives details of an old edition. The author does not understand the law regarding decompilation of computer software and confuses generic trademarks with descriptive trademarks. In the chapter on licence agreements, the author misses out standard clauses that should be present. The appendix summarizing the various IPRs is wildly oversimplified, though to be fair, the author does warn readers that the text has been simplified. There are a few typographical errors and a few sentences which are so badly worded that it is not clear what the author is trying to say. The author sometimes recommends particular computer programs or external consultancies without explaining why he believes them to be so good. Finally, the author fails to identify the key roles that library and information professionals can play in identifying and managing the IPR assets in an organization.
The book is aimed at middle and senior managers in private sector organizations. I think it could provide a useful introduction to recognizing and exploiting IPRs within such organizations, but the number and extent of the problems in the book make it something that readers should be wary of relying on. A second edition correcting the many errors is needed.
