ECTA AWARD 2014
Dear Madam/Sir,
following your email announcement of the ECTA Award 2014 submissions being now opened I am so free to submit my own article “Abundance of Sources” published on November 25, 2011. I hope that this still allows for it to be qualified within the two year term set by the ECTA Award regulations. Although the article has been published in the Croatian Copyright Society Annual Review (Zbornik Hrvatskog Društva za autorsko pravo, 2011, vol. 11-12, pp. 71-152, ISSN 1333-4328) I did not apply last year as Croatia was still not a Member of the EU and hope this still makes for a timely submission. I am the sole author of the article.
The fact that the article was published in a copyright publication should not obfuscate its strong ties to trademark and counterfeiting issues as it treats the two fields of intellectual property intentionally together, transgressing the traditional border between the author’s rights and industrial property. The author believes that bridging the gaps in modern IP became imperative in searching for more successful IP protection regimes and that the times warrant approaches to intellectual property beyond the traditional confines of the Paris and Bern conventions; all in search for more apt solutions to the social issues of piracy and counterfeiting. By using a linguistic and semantic analysis applied to the standard IP terminology the article tries to examine the true meaning of terms related to copying in modern societies. In this sense its title “abundance of sources” reveals not only that that the Latin origin of the words in question can simultaneously mean “copies of originals”, but also the conviction that these words still hold a lot of promise human creativity contains as a fundamental resource for the future societies.
While it is not strictly or chiefly devoted to the trademark issues, its research of the general issues of copying and multiplication might be necessary for rethinking of the current intellectual property concepts. In addition, the article is intentionally not focused on the legislation or legislative issues as it attempts to transcend the usual analysis by looking simultaneously into the past and into the future of the intellectual property law and the future role of law. Obviously, the jury will have to decide whether such a viewpoint makes it more or less relevant under the ECTA Awards Regulations, but it is my belief that it is important that our profession tries to study the social background of the legal context to a greater degree then we do nowadays. As it can be seen from the entire PDF issue of the publication the article has been originally published in the English language, starting at page 71.
Should you need a Microsoft Word version or a “standalone” pdf version of the article as published kindly indicate so as it will be my pleasure to furnish it in addition. Please do not hesitate to request further information or clarification in respect of this submission or point to any formal requirement that might still need to be satisfied. I am looking forward to our further contacts with anticipation.
Best regards MV