Jose Bellido

Forensic Technologies in Music Copyright

The essay explores some recent controversies in British music copyright through the evolving technologies used to perform or play music in the courtroom. Whilst the conceptual tension between cases has caused doctrinal anxiety about the effect of popular music in copyright, the essay contends that the recent stream of music copyright cases can be considered from a historical perspective, taking into account the tools, materials and experts as they featured in court. In doing so, the essay connects a history of legal expertise to the emergence of new technologies whilst arguing that legal knowledge about music copyright was, in fact, stabilized in the courtroom.

Looking Right: The Art of Visual Literacy in British Copyright Litigation

The essay explores the interactive role of experts in the construction of the intangible object in copyright law. It pays special attention to the interventions and eventual connections of a British design consultant and fashion designer, Victor Herbert, in different copyright cases such as the well-known Designers Guild Ltd v. Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd [2001]. The article traces the background of his early court appearances as an expert witness and the range of visual techniques and experiments he developed to “materialize” the incorporeal in copyright law.

Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic

The third edition of Webster’s International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography. Trademark lawyers were not the most prominent of these critics, but the concerns they expressed are significant because they touched on the core structure of the trademark as a form of property in language. In the course of eavesdropping on everyday usage, Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers picked up on the use of trademarks as common nouns: “thermos” as a generic noun for any vacuum flask, “cellophane” as a term for transparent wrapping, and so on. If Webster’s Third were to be taken as sound evidence of the meaning of words, then the danger was that some of the most familiar marks in the USA would be judged “generic” in the legal sense, and would thereby cease to be proprietary. In this article, we explore the implications of this encounter between law and lexicographic technique.

Disney in Spain (1930–1935)

Abstract This article looks at the ways in which the global brand par excellence – Mickey Mouse – spread throughout Spain in the early 1930s. In tracing the creative and commercial interplay with the Mickey character we show how the Disney Company failed to obtain any significant intellectual property rights in its own name or obtain a sympathetic hearing by Spanish patent and trademark officials. Yet this was undoubtedly a period of significant global development of the Disney brand. With the attempt to explain such an apparent contradictory situation, this article highlights the importance of the management of particular struggles in the flux of desires, appropriation and investments that contributed to the emergence of the elusive ‘merchandising right’.

In search of a trade mark. Search practices and bureaucratic poetics

ABSTRACT Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself.

The British Patent System During the Industrial Revolution 1700–1852

Like practically everyone else writing about the history of the British patent law, Bottomleys book begins with a reference to Charles Dickens’ story titled ‘A Poor Mans Tale of a Patent’11 Charl...