Legal Research

By Any Other Name

By Simon Fodden

We learn yet again, from a recent N.Y. Times piece that book titles can’t be copyrighted: there are now two books in print (one 30 years old, mind you) called The Saucier?s Apprentice.

Apart from the fact that Raymond Sokolov, the author of the older book, has done a brilliant job of promoting his work through this piece — it’s the work that comes up when you search for “the saucier’s apprentice” — what interests me is the question of why. Why can’t you copyright a book’s title? Or, to put it more broadly, why can’t you protect your book’s title one way or another, whether by copyright or trademark or…?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 21, 2008 (boomark / email).