Adeney, Elizabeth --- "Trade Mark Law in Australia by Brian Elkington et al" [2001] DeakinLawRw 21; (2001) 6(2) Deakin Law Review 374

Book Review

Trade Mark Law in Australia by Brian Elkington, Michael Hall and David Kell
(Butterworths, Sydney, 2000) 320pp, Price $97.00 (softcover), ISBN 0 409 302 643

ELIZABETH ADENEY[*]

Trade Mark Law in Australia is the kind of statutory annotation that, depending on the market it is directed at and the quantity of available material, may grow into a loose-leaf service or may retain relatively modest dimensions. At the moment this book is on the modest side, a fact no doubt influenced by the newness of the current legislation and by the book’s essentially practical nature. The slimness of the volume creates for it a niche in a market already serviced by larger, more expensive and less manageable volumes. By its own account it is directed at practitioners and students. It will be of undoubted use to both groups, though its primary use will probably be for practitioners. For students it will be a reference text rather than a teaching text. For practitioners it will be the first port of call in investigating the issues that crop up in daily life.

The book is essentially a gloss on the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth) which has been in operation for 6 years now, enough time to have started to build up a body of case law of its own. The current Act replaces the Trade Marks Act 1955, under which most of our leading cases have been decided. Trade Mark Law in Australia is structured according to the present Act but gives full weight to the lawmaking of the past. Each provision of the Act is printed and followed by a passage of commentary, reflecting the opinions of the commentators and referring to the key decisions bearing on the provision or on its counterpart under the earlier Act. Numerous quotations from judgments are given, allowing readers to see for themselves some of the emphases and nuances of the judicial reasoning. The commentary is usefully organised under sub-headings, allowing readers to get their bearings at a glance. The text is indexed according to topic, section, and case.

This is not a research text; it rarely directs its readers towards secondary, scholarly, material. It does, however, beyond the commentary offer historical notes on each section (recent history only), a comparative table listing equivalent sections in the Trade Marks Act 1955, a copy of the Trade Mark Regulations 1995 and a reproduction of the ACCC booklet ‘Certification Trade Mark – Role of the ACCC’. It also contains a guide to the operation of the customs seizure provisions of the Trade Marks Act 1995.

All in all, this book contains much useful and interesting information in short compass. No one who has this volume on the bookshelf need be entirely at a loss when faced with an unexpected problem in trade marks law. This alone is a most persuasive reason for buying the text.

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[*] Lecturer, School of Law, Deakin University.