IP Quester

Writing my IP dictionary brought me into contact with many people I hadn’t met before (and produced many encouraging comments). One such new friend is Erwin Cortagerena,from Argentina, of Equerion Information Services Corporation who has introduced me to his company’s IP Quester Online information service. The service now forms part of – perhaps it forms the whole of – the Lexis Nexis Global IP Law Service, information about which is here. It’s a huge database summarising the basic principles of intellectual property laws in just about all the jurisdictions of the world.

You can search through it in several ways – it’s divided into different areas of IP law, to start with, and of course split up by jurisdiction. So if, for example, you wish to remind yourself of the legal effects of a trade mark registration in the UK, you can select the relevant entries and the answer is displayed, albeit written in Globish – but that’s surely the right language for something like this.

The volume of material is vast – over 13,000 pages of proprietary content. It has all been created in-house by Equerion, and maintained by a dedicated professional team. It’s been going since 2001, and draws on over 300 information sources and 100 law firms. However, it seems to me that it’s strictly a first reference - it doesn’t provide references, or hyperlinks to primary sources, but that’s not what practitioners need anyway. I am a great believer in the ability of the Internet to deliver this sort of basic content very efficiently: far better than sending a message off to an associate several time zones away – although you’ll probably have to do that too.