Expanding Intellectual Property ─ Copyrights and Patents in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond

A result of an international conference held in November 2012 at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe within the framework of the research group “Legal Cultures in 20th Century East-Central Europe: Material and Immaterial Property Rights,” the 12 essays in this volume examine the forms, strategies, mechanisms, and patterns of the expansion of intellectual property norms in Europe and beyond in the 20th century. They explore how institutions expand at the intersection between national, international, transnational, and global interests; the forms the expansion takes; and how national and international stakeholders endorse, promote, modify, or resist developments. They focus on interactions between the law, culture, and society and discuss the institutionalization of copyright and patent law in major political periods and socioeconomic systems of the 20th century, such as National Socialism, the interwar period, capitalism, real socialism, and postsocialism. Law, history, cultural studies, and other scholars from Europe, Israel, and the US address the institutionalization of copyright and patent law, including the historical development of intellectual property rights, the revision conferences of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, the role of expert courts in promoting design as an object of copyright protection in Denmark, the role of patents as instruments of industrial concentration and competition in Germany, the legal dispute over the ownership of copyright of Theodor Herzl’s works, and the fate of Jewish patent holders’ rights in Nazi Germany; intellectual property processes in communist regimes, with discussion of communist Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, and the institutionalization of samizdat as a political act of resistance and alternative economy of production and circulation of texts in communism; and copyright in post-communist societies, including the influence of European Union copyright harmonization directives on postsocialist copyright law in Central and Eastern Europe, intellectual property development in the Republic of Macedonia in the post-Yugoslav era, and the reasons that led Polish citizens to oppose the adoption of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty in 2012. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)