Mergers, Acquisitions and International Financial Regulation: Analysing Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. By Daniele D'Alvia. [London: Routledge, 2021. 258 pp. Hardback £120.00. ISBN 978-0-36760-986-3.]

Abstract

will recognise how such a proprietary right would be highly problematic and would fly in the face of the foundational doctrinal principle of intellectual property law. This takes me to the third lingering question that runs throughout this volume: the difficult concept of property, particularly in relation to information, data and trade secrets. As the editors have chosen to label this a Handbook on Information Law and not Intellectual Property Law, classic intellectual property law doctrine does not necessarily apply. The result is an inevitable hodgepodge of usage, where terms such as “commodity”, “ownership” and “owner” of data are scattered throughout the chapters. The difficulty in pinning down the terminology also illustrates the uncertainty that exists regarding information law’s relationship to traditional property doctrine, misappropriation and competition law. Part III of the Handbook is dedicated to trade secrecy, and Part IV to data protection, privacy and cybersecurity. While focusing most of the book on the US, UK and EU, two of the chapters are dedicated to a non-Western jurisdiction: a chapter by Tatsuhiro Ueno on recent legislative reform in Japan regarding copyright and trade secrets (Chapter 6, “Big Data in Japan”), and a chapter by Henrike Weiden and Kensaku Takase on the reception of European data protection law in Japan (Chapter 14, “Data Privacy in Europe and Its Reception Under Japanese Law”). The discussions of legal issues and emerging technologies are dispersed throughout the volume, with a few dedicated chapters at the end, such as Margot E. Kaminski’s chapter on the right to explainability in EU data protection law (Chapter 15, “The Right to Explanation, Explained”), and Faye Fangfei Wang’s chapter on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity (Chapter 17, “Legislative Developments on Cybersecurity in the EU in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”), engaging with the frontiers of the academic debates in these areas of law. This Handbook is undoubtedly a good resource for anyone interested in the foundational tenets of many areas of information law. However, the heavy focus on established intellectual property scholarship begs the question whether its authors are ready to embrace this field as a new branch of law, as argued for in Nathenson’s first chapter, or simply stretch the intellectual property umbrella even wider. Cognisant that any volume can only represent a small fraction of a field, the omission of many of the new areas of information law suggests that there is room for the publisher’s Information Law Series to continue to make salient contributions to this growing literature for quite some time.