"Who is Gillian? What is she ...?"

Yours for only £12.74, here

It's not yet featuring on the publisher's website, but Copyright Law for Artists, Photographers and Designers is already in this reviewer's hands. One of A & C Black's Essential Guides series, along with The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers by Alison Branigan, which does not come out till February 2011, this little tome -- it feels like a longer book but the paper is hugely thick and it's only 96 pages long -- is written by Gillian Davies.

At this point, copyright experts will be excited by the prospect of an attractive, handsomely illustrated and easy-to-understand text from one of the world's great copyright lawyers -- but the excitement dies down in legal quarters when it is discovered that the author is not the Gillian Davies, a leading contributor to Copinger and Skone James and towering personality in the international copyright arena. Nor is she the other Gillian Davies or the other other Gillian Davies, but merely an other Gillian Davies. Calling your son Wayne Rooney may not turn him into a famous footballer but calling your daughter Gillian Davies will, it seems, firmly implant her within the cusp of law and art, one way or another.

What about the book, I hear you say. It's not bad. Seriously. And this is not surprising. Anyone whose grateful acknowledgements extend to ACID Queen Dids Macdonald and to the gentle, knowledgeable Simon Stokes has either done their homework well or knows who to get to do it for them. Gillian however knows something that many copyright experts don't know -- she knows her readership and pitches her words of advice and warning (Beware of the Bridgeman ...) at a level that will be at once appreciated and understood. This book will never replace Copinger and Skone James, but anyone who reads it may well be saved from having to pay some expensive IP specialists to read Copinger and Skone James for them.