©-LAW

UniKat: Working hard ... not to fall asleep Several students are currently busy choosing or will shortly choose topics to develop in the context of their own university theses and dissertations, including at the LLM/master level and in the context of PhD proposals/early stages of their PhDs. Often, students have to submit a ‘Proposal’, which tackles how they intend to develop their work . The allowed word count for a thesis/dissertation varies: it is approximately somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 words for an LLM dissertation and 75,000-100,000 words for a PhD.  The funny thing about LLM/PhD proposals is that one is expected to know what they are going to write about  before  they have done all the required research and actually know what needs to be written about. Several books and articles have been written on how to develop a good piece of academic research, whether as a student or as a professional researcher.  However...

Determining whether a certain, unauthorised use of a work is shielded from liability by means of an exception is not an easy exercise.  Things may get even more complicated if the applicable law is that of a country, eg the UK and all the other EU Member States, that does not have an open-ended fair use-style exception but rather requires one to, first,  identify  what exception might be applicable to the case at hand and, secondly,  verify  that all the relevant conditions for the application of that particular exception are satisfied. As part of my  IP Materials Series , I have prepared a high-level checklist for my students (currently busy with their IP revision) of the questions to ask when determining whether a certain exception in the  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA)  is actually applicable to the case at hand. [ Of course, the checklist is only meant as a study aid, and does not pretend to be an exhaustive assessment of ...