Philip Leith - Böcker

The computer program exclusion from Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) proved impossible to uphold as industry moved over to digital technology, and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) felt emboldened to circumvent the EPC in Vicom by creating the legal fiction of 'technical effect'. This 'engineer's solution' emphasised that protection should be available for a device, a situation which has led to software and business methods being protected throughout Europe when the form of application, rather than the substance, is acceptable. Since the Article 52 exclusion has effectively vanished, this text examines what makes examination of software invention difficult and what leads to such energetic opposition to protecting inventive activity in the software field. Leith advocates a more programming-centric approach, which recognises that software examination requires different strategies from that of other technical fields.

The computer program exclusion from Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) proved impossible to uphold as industry moved over to digital technology, and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) felt emboldened to circumvent the EPC in Vicom by creating the legal fiction of 'technical effect'. This 'engineer's solution' emphasised that protection should be available for a device, a situation which has led to software and business methods being protected throughout Europe when the form of application, rather than the substance, is acceptable. Since the Article 52 exclusion has effectively vanished, this text examines what makes examination of software invention difficult and what leads to such energetic opposition to protecting inventive activity in the software field. Leith advocates a more programming-centric approach, which recognises that software examination requires different strategies from that of other technical fields.

Information society projects promise wealth and better services to those countries which digitise and encourage the consumer and citizen to participate. As paper recedes into the background and digital data becomes the primary resource in the information society, what does this mean for privacy? Can there be privacy when every communication made through ever-developing ubiquitous devices is recorded? Data protection legislation developed as a reply to large scale centralised databases which contained incorrect data and where data controllers denied access and refused to remedy information flaws. Some decades later the technical world is very different one, and whilst data protection remains important, the cries for more privacy-oriented regulation in commerce and eGov continue to rise. What factors should underpin the creation of new means of regulation? The papers in this collection have been drawn together to develop the positive and negative effects upon the information society which privacy regulation implies.

Privacy has now become a major topic not only in law but in computing, psychology, economics and social studies, and the explosion in scholarship has made it difficult for the student to traverse the field and identify the significant issues across the many disciplines. This series brings together a collection of significant papers with a multi-disciplinary approach which enable the reader to navigate through the complexities of the issues and make sense of the prolific scholarship published in this field. Each of the three volumes in this series has a theme: an anthropological approach to what privacy means in a cultural context; the issue of state surveillance where the state must both protect the individual and protect others from that individual and also protect itself; and, finally, what privacy might mean in a world where government and commerce collect data incessantly. The regulation of privacy is continually being called for and these papers help enable understanding of the ethical rationales behind the choices made in the sphere of regulation of privacy. The articles presented in each of these collections have been chosen for the quality of their scholarship and their utility to the researcher, and feature a variety of approaches. The articles which debate the technical context of privacy are accessible to those from the arts and humanities; overall, the breadth of approach taken in the choice of articles has created a series which is an invaluable and important resource for lecturers, researchers and student.