With the Open Access movement continuing to grow, there are an ever-increasing number of Open Access books on various aspects of IP law and policy. Of course, very few deal directly with Indian law and that’s something we hope gets remedied over time – but in the meanwhile, there are a number of very well written Open Access books on foreign aspects and general principles of IP law that should keep the IP enthusiast quite busy. We’ve attempted to list a number of useful books below. Outside of the list below, the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center has a great collection of their own Open Access books, 37 at last count, available here. And Prof Grimmelman has put together a well categorized list of ‘inexpensive and open-access’ American IP textbooks here. There are some other fantastic resources out there, such as the Database of Open-Access Books (DOAB), the Open Textbook Library, and the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN). However it does take a bit of sorting and searching to find books that one may find useful. So, we’ve listed several of those books in our list below.
This list has been put together in no particular order and will continue to be periodically updated. And the presence of a book on this list does not mean SpicyIP endorses the quality or contents of the book. Additionally, the term “open-access” is being used loosely, to include various types of open licenses – the primary objective being to provide readers with a list of IP books they can legally access without payment rather than focusing on any specific type of license. As with our list of Non Open Access IP Books, we request readers to let us know of notable omissions (and mistakes, if any) in the comments section of this post.
| Author/s or Editor/s |
Title |
Publisher |
Year |
Subject Matter |
Indian PoV |
Foreign PoV |
| Eric Von Hippel |
Democratizing Innovation (link) |
MIT Press |
2006 |
Innovation |
No |
Yes |
| Murphy Halliburton |
India and Patent Wars (link) |
Cornell University Press |
2017 |
Patents |
Yes |
No |
| Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski (ed.) |
Access to knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (link) |
Zone Books | The MIT Press |
2010 |
Patents, Copyright, TRIPS, A2K |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ashish Bharadwaj, Vishwas H. Devaiah, Indranath Gupta |
Multi-dimensional Approaches Towards New Technology (link) |
Springer Open |
2018 |
Patents |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ashish Bharadwaj, Vishwas H. Devaiah, Indranath Gupta |
Complications and Quandaries in the ICT Sector – Standard Essential Patents and Competition Issues (link) |
Springer Open |
2018 |
Patents, Others |
Yes |
Yes |
Kung-Chung Liu,
Uday S. Racherla |
Innovation, Economic Development, and Intellectual Property in India and China (link) |
Springer Open |
2019 |
Patents, Copyright, Plant Varieties, Others |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ramesh Subramanian and Lea Shaver (eds) |
Access to Knowledge in India: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation & Development (link) |
Bloomsbury Academic |
2011 |
A2K |
Yes |
No |
| Burton B. Callicott, David Scherer, Andrew Wesolek |
Making Institutional Repositories Work (link) |
Purdue University Press |
2015 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Jesús Lau, Anna Maria Tammaro & Theo Bothma |
Libraries Driving Access to Knowledge (A2K) (link) |
De Gruyter Saur |
2012 |
Copyright, A2K |
No |
Yes |
| James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins |
Intellectual Property: Law & Information Society Cases and Materials (link) |
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain |
2018 |
Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks, TRIPS |
No |
Yes |
| James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins and Keith Aoki |
Theft! A history of Music (link) |
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain |
2017 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| James Boyle |
The Public Domain – Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (link) |
Yale University Press |
2008 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins |
Bound by Law (link) |
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain |
2006 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Barton Beebe |
“Trademark Law: An Open-Source Casebook
Version 6.0 (Summer 2019)”(link) |
New York University School of Law |
2019 |
Trademark |
No |
Yes |
| Peter Drahos, Susy Frankel |
Indigenous peoples’ innovation: Intellectual Property Pathways to Development (link) |
Australian National University Press |
2012 |
GI/TK, others |
No |
Yes |
| Monirul Azam |
Intellectual Property and Public Health in the Developing World (link) |
Open Book Publishers |
2016 |
Pharmaceutical Industry, Patents and Others. |
No |
Yes |
| Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds.) |
Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright (link) |
Open Book Publishers |
2010 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Sean Johnson Andrews |
The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights (link) |
Temple University Press |
2019 |
Culture, Intellectual Property, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Laikwan Pang |
Creativity and its Discontents Chinas Creative Indutry and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (link) |
Duke University Press |
2012 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Mariano Zukerfeld |
Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism (link) |
University of Westminster Press |
2017 |
Others |
No |
Yes |
| C. Armstrong, J. de Beer, D. Kawooya, A. Prabhala, and T. Schonwetter |
Access to Knowledge in Africa: The Role of Copyright (link) |
UCT Press |
2010 |
Copyright, A2K |
No |
Yes |
| Hector Postigo |
Digital Rights movement: Role of technology in subverting digital copyright (link) |
MIT Press |
2012 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| May, Sarah; Sidali, Katia Laura; Spiller, Achim; Tschofen, Bernhard (eds.) |
“Taste | Power | Tradition
Geographical Indications as Cultural Property”(link) |
Universitätsverlag Göttingen |
2017 |
Copyright, Trademark, GI & Others |
No |
Yes |
| Gavin Salomon Kotze, Esmé Desiré du Plessis, Simon Barratt Brown, Megan Moerdijk, Kelly-Marie Thompson, Jennifer Pienaar, Nicolette Garnett, Nthabisheng Phaswana |
Adams & Adams Practical Guide to Intellectual Property in Africa (link) |
Pretoria University Legal Press |
2012 |
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks & Others |
No |
Yes |
| Kochi Hishida |
Fulfilling the Promise of Technology Transfer (link) |
Springer |
2013 |
Technology Transfer, Patents |
No |
Yes |
| Janis Jefferies and Sarah Kember |
Whose Book is it Anyway? A View From Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity (link) |
Open Book Publishers |
2019 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Nagla Rizk and Lea Shaver (eds) |
Access to Knowledge in Egypt
New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development (link) |
Bloomsbury Publishing |
2014 |
Patents, Copyright, Trademark, A2K, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Petr Szczepanik, Pavel Zahrádka, Jakub Macek, Paul Stepan |
Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Audiovisual Content from the Small Market Perspective (link) |
Springer Open |
2020 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Lea Shaver (ed) |
Access to Knowledge in Brazil (link) |
Yale Law School |
2008 |
Patents, Copyright, A2K, Others |
No |
Yes |
| David Koepsell |
Innovation and Nanotechnology
Converging Technologies and the End of Intellectual Property (link) |
Bloomsbury Open Access |
2014 |
Patents, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Daniela Benavente |
Economics of Geographical Indication (link) |
Graduate Institute Publications |
2012 |
GI |
No |
Yes |
| Rebecca Giblin, Kimberlee Weatherall |
What if we could reimagine copyright?(link) |
ANU Press |
2017 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Susan Corbett |
Making Copyright Work for the Asian Pacific: Juxtaposing Harmonisation with Flexibility (link) |
ANU Press |
2018 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Eric von Hippel |
Free Innovation (link) |
MIT Press |
2016 |
Innovation |
No |
Yes |
| Julian Phillip Christ |
Innovative Places in Europe:Research Clustering, Co-Patenting Networks and the Growth of Regions (link) |
Peter Lang International Publishers |
2012 |
Innovation, Patents |
No |
Yes |
| Supriyo Das, Ignasi Brunet Icart |
Innovation Policy of European Chemical Companies (link) |
Publicacions URV |
2016 |
Innovation, Patents |
No |
Yes |
| Mireille van Eechoud |
The Work of Authorship (link) |
Amsterdam University Press |
2014 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Corinne Tan |
Regulating Content on Social Media: Copyright, Terms of Service and Technological Features (link) |
UCL Press |
2018 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Claudy Op den Kamp |
The Greatest Films Never Seen: The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreen (link) |
Amsterdam University Press |
2018 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Juan Carlos De Martin (eds.) |
The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture (link) |
Open Book Publishers |
2012 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh |
Interfaces on Trial 2.0 (link) |
MIT Press |
2011 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Peter Suber |
Open Access (link) |
MIT Press |
2012 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Lawrence Lessig (8 titles) |
8 books: Republic Lost; The USA is Lesterland; One Way Forward; Remix; Code Version 2.0; Free Culture; The Future of Ideas; Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (link) |
MIT Press |
2012 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| John Palfrey |
Intellectual Property Strategy (link) |
MIT Press |
2011 |
Other |
No |
Yes |
| James Grimmelmann |
Patterns of Information Law –
Intellectual Property Done Right (link) |
Self Published |
2017 |
Patents, Copyright, Trademark, A2K, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Matthew Sag |
Extended Readings on Copyright (link) |
Self Published |
2019 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Daniel Burgos |
Radical Solutions and Open Science: An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education (link) |
Springer |
2020 |
Copyright, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Ellen ‘t Hoen |
The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power: Drug patents, access, innovation and the application of the WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and public health (link) |
AMB Publishers |
2009 |
Patents, A2M, Others |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ellen ‘t Hoen |
Private Patents nd Public Health: Changing Intellectual Property Rules for Access to Medicines (link) |
Health Action International |
2016 |
Patents, A2M, Others |
No |
Yes |
| Stephen Kinsella |
Against Intellectual Property (link) |
Ludwig Von Mises Institute |
2008 |
Others |
No |
Yes |
| Peter Drahos |
A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (link) |
ANU eText |
2016 |
Others |
No |
Yes |
| Jessica Litman |
Digital Copyright (link) |
Michigan Publishing |
2017 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Berkman Centre for Internet and Society |
Copyright for Librarians: The essential handbook (link) |
EIFL |
2012 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Dr. Till Kreutzer |
Open Content: A Practical guide to using Creative Common Lincense (link) |
Wikimedia and German Commission for UNESCO |
2014 |
Copyright, Others |
Yes |
Yes |
| Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine |
Against Intellectual Monopoly (link) |
Cambridge University Press |
2008 |
Innovation, Others |
No |
Yes |
| The Michelson 20MM Foundation |
The Intangible Advantage: Understanding Intellectual Property in the New Economy (link) |
The Michelson 20MM Foundation |
2016 |
Patent, Trademark, Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Aram Sinnreich |
The Piracy Crusade: How the music industry’s war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties (link) |
University of Massachusetts Press |
2013 |
Copyright |
No |
Yes |
| Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz (eds) |
Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (link) |
Bloomsburry Open Access |
2014 |
Copyright, Others |
Yes |
Yes |
| Jayashree Watal, Anthony Taubman (Eds) |
The Making of the TRIPS Agreement: Personal Insights from the Uruguay Round Negotiations (link) |
WTO |
2015 |
TRIPS |
Yes |
Yes |
| Open Sourced |
Open Source Case Book (link) |
Google |
open |
Patents, Trademarks, Copyright |
Yes |
Yes |
[Last updated on 29th June 2020].
If you would like to suggest a book to be added to this list, please leave a comment with the name and where the book can be found, in the comments of this post. Those who would like to check out our other list of IP Books (Non Open-Access), please click here.
