Reviews for Patent Law Digest

The average rating for Patent Law Digest based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-31 00:00:00 Timothy Sullivan Stephen Fry is, of course, a tremendously funny man. And it would hardly be controversial to say that he represents a particularly English perspective on things. The perspective of a privately-educated, cricket-loving, sesquipedalian Oxbridge graduate. He's almost a romanticised version of an Englishman - the funny, bumbling, cultural, delightful dinner guest. You could imagine that the inside of his head is a 1930s wood-panelled library, Radio 4 on in the background, a faint whiff of pipesmoke in the carpet. Except of course the wireless wouldn't be tuned to the World at One, it would be blaring out The Onedin Line; played for the twelth time that day on Classic FM. His book - through Classic FM - traces 'classical music' (read: western music) from the very earliest traces of music and instruments in mesopotamia right the way to the cutting edge of the year 2003, when the book was written. And it is a book that could only have been written by Fry. It's an attempt to capture the spirit of Classic FM - crowd-pleasing tunes and tidbits of information - in his style of dinner party conversation. I kind of wish I liked it. I honestly found this book tiring to read. Not because anything in it is approaching hard to understand - it's not - but because Fry keeps changing the tempo, font, structure, tone, perspective, and humour levels every three or four paragraphs. Reading for more than a few pages at a time felt like I was watching one of Robin Williams' more esoteric standup routines, playing myriad characters one after the other while you try to catch up. Just much, much less funny. It really doesn't work in print form. It's of course an attempt to make interesting subject matter that some might consider boring, but the phrase 'throw enough shit at a wall and some of it will stick' comes to mind. The book would have benefited significantly from a more coherent structure - even just within individual chapters - and consistent tone. The story the book covers is interesting enough on its own without the need to constantly change gears in an attempt to keep peoples' interest. I'm sure that Fry's decision to write the book in this way will have kept some readers interested who otherwise would have drifted off mid-way through. Which is the point of it and of Classic FM - to engage a broader audience with classical music and remove some of the perceived barriers and requisites to listening to 'posh person music'. Fry talking about how music has been used in adverts and about his personal experiences with certain pieces will definitely make the subject matter more relatable. And it should be commended for that. But I do not believe that the style he chose widens access to a point where it justifies diminishing the source material, and the reader experience of it. If I were to criticise the book more on its content that it's style I would definitely say that while Fry gives a clear structure to the evolution of music (insofar as the names we use to describe the periods) his personal preference for the romantics shines very clearly. The renaissance and baroque periods don't come off so badly from this, and the classical era itself gets a strong representation, but 20th century music as a whole gets entirely shafted. The book ends with a whimper not a bang, almost as if Fry figures that nothing really mattered in music after Wagner and Mahler died, and several modernist movements such as minimalism and post-minimalism don't even get a mention. Of course being an author allows you to put your personal preferences and biases into your work, and its entirely fair that Fry exercises that right. I guess I would just have preferred to see more discussion of early music, modern music, and more than a handful of words about the huge breadth of religious music that has been written consistently since the classical period. Also Fry just starts to tackle film music and whether it is the spiritual successor to 'classical music' before the book just ends abruptly. No conclusion to that discussion. No discussion of jazz and blues and rock and soul branching out from existing forms of 'classical music'. After the amount of time you spent talking about Wagner??? This isn't to say that I didn't learn anything from the book. During my time in Fry's musty library I picked up quite a few tidbits that I'll undoubtedly blurt out on demand like a serial viewer of QI. But this felt like more of a missed opportunity than a resounding success. If you enjoy listening to Classic FM, references to 1980s advertising campaigns, Wagner, have an attention span of about a minute at a time, and think that Stephen Fry is the modern day version of Oscar Wilde then you'll probably love this book. Otherwise, I'd recommend other titles.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-22 00:00:00 Brad Davis Description is incorrect, this was first published in 1970.