As an area of legal study and practice, intellectual property (or IP) law lacks the conceptual coherence of an internally consistent and discrete law subject like contract, crimina’ or tort, which each has its own normative rules applicable throughout, or even one that describes a category of law involving the application of a number of such law subjects to a particular subject matter, like environmental law or entertainment law. For this reason, mixing and matching notions or terms from one area of IP law with those from others can be at best confusing and at worst dangerously misleading, however beguiling it may be to do so. To avoid both, the well-crafted IP treatise provides invaluable assistance and clarification.