More books for review

JIPLP's latest batch of books for review is listed below. If you're interested in reviewing any of them, please email Sarah Harris at sarah.harris@oup.com by close of play on Thursday 15 August and let her know. As usual, if you are not already known to the JIPLP team, can you please append a CV or give us some brief biographical details so that we can see why your opinion of the book you wish to review might be of particular relevance to our readers.

A quick reminder: while book reviewers are permitted to keep each book once it has been reviewed, if for any reason you are unable to review it within a relatively short time we will be asking you to return it at your own expense so that we can give it to another reviewer.

This batch of books on offer is as follows:

Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology.
Editors: Mireille Hildebrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy.
Publisher: Routledge (a GlassHouse Book)

"Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agency implied by the emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence – self-governing systems – challenge traditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideas of identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic – yet artificial – systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How ‘distinctively human’ will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense, ‘human’ anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offer for a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law".

Further details can be obtained from the book's web page here.

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Cyberspace Law Censorship and Regulation of the Internet
Editor: Hannibal Travis.
Publisher: Routledge

"This book explores what the American Civil Liberties Union calls the "third era" in cyberspace, in which filters "fundamentally alter the architectural structure of the Internet, with significant implications for free speech." Although courts and nongovernmental organizations increasingly insist upon constitutional and other legal guarantees of a freewheeling Internet, multi-national corporations compete to produce tools and strategies for making it  more predictable. When Google attempted to improve our access to information containing in books and the World Wide Web, copyright litigation began to tie up the process of making content searchable, and resulted in the wrongful removal of access to thousands if not millions of works.  

Just as the courts were insisting that using trademarks online to criticize their owners is First Amendment-protected, corporations and trade associations accelerated their development of ways to make Internet companies liable for their users’ infringing words and actions, potentially circumventing free speech rights. And as social networking and content-sharing sites have proliferated, so have the terms of service and content-detecting tools for detecting, flagging, and deleting content that makes one or another corporation or trade association fear for its image or profits. The book provides a legal history of Internet regulation since the mid-1990s, with a particular focus on efforts by patent, trademark, and copyright owners to compel Internet firms to monitor their online offerings and remove or pay for any violations of the rights of others".

Further details of this book may be obtained from its web page here.

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The Art Collecting Legal Handbook,
Editors: Bruno Boesch and Massimo Sterpi
Publishers: Sweet & Maxwell

"Collecting, preserving and promoting cultural goods, whether fine art, archaeological objects or decorative arts, is now global. Oddly, rules and practices have remained very local, save for ICOM’s efforts at the institutional level and UNESCO’s endeavours to help preserve national cultural heritage and combat illicit trafficking.

This book is designed to help the collector and their advisers navigate the maze on an international level. Each chapter of The Art Collecting Manual addresses a number of issues from the perspective of a different jurisdiction to help collectors making errors that could be potenitally illegal. The format of the chapters follow a question and answer style thus enabling readers to make quick and accurate comparisons in multiple jurisdictions covering property law, insurance, customs, tax, inheritance, intellectual property and more".

Further information concerning this book can be obtained from its web page here.

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Pharmaceutical Innovation, Competition And Patent Law: a Trilateral Perspective
Editors: Josef Drexl and Nari Lee
Publisher: Edward Elgar

"Public health, safety and access to reasonably priced medicine are common policy goals of pharmaceutical regulations. As both the context for innovation and competitive structure change, industry actors dynamically challenge the balance between the incentive for protection and the achievement of those policy goals.

Considering the arguments from the perspectives of innovation, competition law and patent law, this book explores the difficult question of balancing protection with access, highlighting the difficulties in harmonization and coordination. The contributors to this book, including academics, judges and practitioners from Europe, the US and Japan, explore to what extent patent strategies and life-cycle management practices take advantage of patent laws and health-care regulation and disrupt the necessary balance between incentives for innovation and access to affordable medicine and health care".

Further details of this book may be obtained from its web page here.

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Copyright and Mass Digitization
Authors: Maurizio Borghi and Stavroula Karapapa
Publisher: Oxford University Press

"Mass digitization of texts, images, and other creative works promises to unprecedentedly enhance access to culture and knowledge. With the electronic 'library of Alexandria' having started to materialize, a number of legal and policy issues have emerged. The book develops an extended conceptual account of the ways in which mass digital projects challenge the established copyright norms through the wholesale copying of works, their storage in cloud environments, and their automated processing for purposes of data analytics and text mining. As individual licensing is not compatible with the mass scale of these activities, alternative approaches have gained momentum as effect of judicial interpretation, legislative initiative and private-ordering solutions.".

Further details of this book may be obtained from its web page here