Law does not have its intended effect if people do not know the law. Law should be known by the people who derive rights and obligations from it. Chaotic law, though known by the people, does not have its intended effect either. To be respected, law should at least be logical and consistent, and not prompt chicaneries. Law is what courts say the law is. Courts have to decide case by case. Their judgments express what the law is in the case submitted. The people involved and other interested people will know what the court has decided.

The number of Chinese legal scholarly publications has grown dramatically in the last ten years as the Chinese government legislature churned out an expansive body of law, with an impressive proliferation of print treatises and web-based legal information in the vernacular. This article offers a sampling of legal scholars and their treatises. It is organized by subject area, and is offered as a selective annotated treatise finder. The list focuses on legal publications published within the last two decades subsequent to the amendment of the 1982 Chinese Constitution in 1989. Some of the authors included here wrote extensively on specific legal topics, while others were involved in the deliberation, preparation, and drafting of key legislation. It is hoped that the article provides a roadmap that will be useful to students and others new to research in Chinese law; to help them locate relevant treatises, journal literature, and to jumpstart their research into specific legislation and legal topics.

Our topic is the impact of English common law on American law. Our thesis is that the impact was considerable, mutual, and long-running; also that it will be possible to demonstrate the connectedness of Anglo and American variants chiefly by using bibliographic methods. For this purpose, we shall make use of the collections of the Bounds Law Library of the University of Alabama—though the collections of many well-established state law schools would equally suffice. In addition, we can call upon the vast amount of bibliographic information available online through WorldCat and related databases.

This paper endeavours to dispel the logical conclusion which one may draw from the territorial nature of intellectual property rights and aims to show that the term “international intellectual property” may refer to the underlying products of intellect which give rise to rights granted internationally and which are, themselves, rights of a different sort.

To suggest that “there is no such thing as international intellectual property” may have been particularly reasonable prior to the end of the 19th century when there was little or no international obligations to protect intellectual property. Nowadays, however, the term “international intellectual property” is, at the very least, misunderstood, if not a clear term that has worked its way into the international legal lexicon with each international intellectual property agreement entered into since the beginning of the beginning of the international period.

It is quite plain that individual intellectual property rights such as copyright, patents, registered designs, and registered and unregistered trade mark rights are not international in scope or nature. It is also quite clear that intellectual property rights are territorial in nature as they are derived from national law and are governed exclusively within jurisdictions of such law. This principle is trite and was better observed in a World Intellectual Property Organization survey:

Each country determines, for its own territory and independently from any other country, what it is to be protected as intellectual property, who should benefit from such protection, for how long and how protection should be enforced.

Despite an apparently logical conclusion which one may draw from the territorial nature of intellectual property rights, the term “international intellectual property” may infer something more than this. Rather than confining the term to basic interpretation of the words which make the term, international intellectual property may refer to the underlying products of intellect which give rise to rights granted internationally and which are, themselves, rights of a different sort. While the standards of recognition and rights granted in relation to such products of intellect may vary between nations, the source of such products remains the same and it is such property which various international agreements seek to govern. It is given through developments in international intellectual property agreements, that a definition of the term may be implied, if not derived.

In this paper, I endeavour to establish that there is such thing as international intellectual property. As such, I will first establish that there is such a thing as „intellectual property,” despite arguments against the term. I will then move on to establish that there is such thing as international intellectual property, particularly in light of the developments in international intellectual property agreements.

This paper begins by tracking the history of piracy from Greek and Roman times, to the Golden Age of piracy, into modern day. It also looks at the motivations for becoming a pirate and the “piracy cycle.” The paper then moves into a discussion of how piracy has influenced the law, such as its impact on Universal Jurisdiction and international treaties like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; however, a stable definition of what constitutes “piracy” has become troublesome, even with the abundance of legal sources related to the subject. The paper then moves into a discussion of three US court cases dealing with the issue of piracy: the first from the Golden Age of piracy, the second in the early part of this century showing how piracy is not always prosecuted in the traditional sense, and finally with the case of the famous pirate the US Navy SEALS captured during the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama. Finally, the paper concludes the discussion using the modern day situation of Somalia to show how the “piracy cycle” is still capable of explaining what draws people to piracy, how that particular situation has been combated by the international community, and how neighboring countries, like Kenya, are using their own court systems to the advantage of the rest of the world.