It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the 'identity' field, or at the beginning of the comment. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment. You can read it in full here.Īll comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. This article was published as 'Elinor Glyn and the 'Three Weeks' Litigation' 12 European Intellectual Property Review 336-340. On some other fur?But would the author's notoriety, and the theme of Three Weeks itself, bar Glyn from enforcing her copyright on grounds of public policy? This is reflected in a rhyme which, occasionally cited even today, is more often read than any of her novels:

There is no doubt, as this article explains, that Elinor Glyn was capable of shocking and scandalising contemporary British society. The background to this litigation is as fascinating as the case itself: the trial was conducted in the middle of the First World War, at a time when the old order and Victorian social mores were beginning to disintegrate but sexual emancipation had not yet found a firm footing.

The fourth item in the little bundle of photocopied articles on IP history which this Kat researched and wrote back in the 1980s, when he was still a full-time academic, addresses a curious episode in early twentieth-century copyright history - the attempt of British novelist Elinor Glyn to enforce copyright in a short novel, Three Weeks, against the makers of a film, unauthorised by her, which savagely caricatured it.

It by Elinor Glyn