Professor Cedric Manara, Associate Law Professor at EDHEC Business School was recently interviewed by the Register and by Intellectual Property Watch on the recent Google Case, in which Google launched its Belgian version of Google News and was taken to court by several Belgian news publishers for from displaying copyrighted content without permission.

According to Professor Manara, this was the first time Google had taken a copyright hit over its Google News service and explained that once someone publishes on the Web, he gives "an implicit license to search tools".Those who do not want their content indexed can turn to metatags such as no index, no follow, or robot.txt. Some publishers have already signed agreements with Google giving them control over what is indexed and which Manara believes is a reasonable practice.  "Now that they are no longer indexed, and Google has removed their links from Google News as well as from the entire search engine, will their traffic remain the same?" he asks. "There is a French expression that says one cannot have the butter and the money made from the butter. The Copiepress case amounts to the same thing. You cannot be indexed on Google and complain that there are links directing to the article that is indexed, and not to the homepage."

EDHEC's  Law Department is fertile in intellectual property publications (articles, chapters in books essentially), particularly prolific and noted on topics such as the sensitive subject of domain names, search tools indexing, protection of the electronic brand. More than 200 articles were published, along with five books in the IP/IT field. Approximately 40 conferences were given on the topic, in France and abroad.

Intellectual property is a topic frequently addressed in the school's conferences which gained national and international attention. The Law Department organized the First and Second international days of electronic commerce, on the Nice campus, which included several lectures on intellectual property issues and the publication of the proceedings (two 300 page books) and the School also hosted a conference in January 2006, which included a presentation by the Murgitroyd law firm on the management of the rights of the famous Beckham couple.

EDHEC's interest in intellectual property activities is easily explained by the importance of managing and protecting intellectual property rights in a business. Intellectual property rights are valuable assets for any business and such a topic could not be overlooked when training future business leaders and managers.

Professor Manara intervenes in the MSc in Strategic Management programme in the Strategic Aspects of Intellectual Property Law class.