This volume explores the nature of intellectual property law by looking at particular disputes. All the cases gathered here aim to show the versatile and unstable character of a discipline still searching for landmarks. Each contribution offers an opportunity to raise questions about the narratives that have shaped the discipline throughout its short but profound history. The volume begins by revisiting patent litigation to consider the impact of the Statute of Monopolies (1624). It continues looking at different controversies to describe how the existence of an author's right in literary property was a plausible basis for legal argument, even though no statute expressly mentioned authors' rights before the Statute of Anne (1710). The collection also explores different moments of historical significance for intellectual property law: the first trade mark injunctions; the difficulties the law faced when protecting maps; and the origins of originality in copyright law. Similarly, it considers the different ways of interpreting patent claims in the late nineteenth and twentieth century; the impact of seminal cases on passing off and the law of confidentiality; and more generally, the construction of intellectual property law and its branches in their interaction with new technologies and marketing developments. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of intellectual property law.

One of the common themes in recent public debate has been the law's inability to accommodate the new ways of creating, distributing and replicating intellectual products. In this book the authors argue that in order to understand many of the problems currently confronting the law, it is necessary to understand its past. This is its first detailed historical account. In this book the authors explore two related themes. First, they explain why intellectual property law came to take its now familiar shape with sub-categories of patents, copyright, designs and trade marks. Secondly, the authors set out to explain how it is that the law grants property status to intangibles. In doing so they explore the rise and fall of creativity as an organising concept in intellectual property law, the mimetic nature of intellectual property law and the important role that the registration process plays in shaping intangible property.

Although the pivotal role of the inventiveness requirement in patent law is broadly accepted, it has long remained an ill-defined concept, and in current debates the question is often raised whether the requirement is capable of functioning as an adequate ‘gate-keeper’. By providing a broad and historical perspective on the inventiveness concept in patent law, this groundbreaking work lays a very thorough conceptual basis for further and more in-depth discussions on current standards of inventiveness. In a method guided by geography and chronology, the author weaves developments in numerous countries – focusing primarily on the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands – into a fullscale analysis of the inventiveness concept. Among the questions raised and examined are the following: - How do industrial–economic considerations influence the requirement? - Are there different doctrinal ‘schools of thought’ that can be distinguished? - Should the current requirement stay in close relationship with its predecessors or is it fundamentally different? - Which socio-economic and political forces have influenced or diverted the evolution of the requirement? - What are the most conspicuous similarities and dissimilarities among the jurisdictions under examination? And how can they be explained? - To what extent is the ‘inventive step’ requirement applied in a uniform manner within the European Patent Convention area? - To what extent has the enormous recent growth of patent grants been brought about by relaxation of the inventiveness requirement? This book provides crucially important fundamental commentary for lawyers, jurists, and scholars coming to grips with a hugely complex legal phenomenon: the dramatic growth worldwide in recent years of patents as instruments for the protection of industrial property. Particularly welcome in these times of intensifying scrutiny of patent law, this incomparable analysis will quickly become a cornerstone resource for intellectual property lawyers, patent officers, in-house counsel in multinational manufacturing companies, and other interested practitioners.