Patent Cultures

Featuring contributors from a dozen countries, this comprehensive volume examines patenting through an interdisciplinary and global perspective. It reveals the persistent diversity of patent systems despite ongoing globalization projects and will appeal to historians of science and technology, policy experts, intellectual property lawyers, and economists alike.

Part I. Introductory: 1. Diversity versus harmonization in patent history: an overview Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf; 2. The 1883 Paris Convention and the impossible unification of industrial property Gabriel Galvez-Behar; 3. One for all? The American patent system and harmonization of international intellectual property laws Zorina Khan; Part II. Americas: Technical Imaginaries: 4. US patent models as specimen and specification Courtney Fullilove; 5. Mexico and the puzzle of partial harmonization: nineteenth-century patent Law reconsidered Edward Beatty; 6. An early patent system in Latin America: the Chilean case, 1840s-1900s Bernardita Escobar Andrae; Part III. Southern Europe: 7. The Italian patent system during the long nineteenth century: from privileges to property rights in a latecomer industrializing country Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta; 8. Industrial 'property', law, and the politics of invention in Greece, 1900-1940 Stathis Arapostathis; 9. Mediation and harmonization: construction of the Spanish patent system in the twentieth century Ana Romero de Pablos; Part IV. Central and Eastern Europe: 10. The struggle over 'the social function of intellectual work in the economy of nations': engineers, patent law, and enterprise inventions in Germany and their European significance Karl Hall; 11. Multiple loyalties: hybrid patent regimes in the Habsburg empire and its successor states Karl Hall; 12. Patent debates on invention from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union Karl Hall; Part V. Asia: 13. Patent policy in India under the British Raj: a bittersweet story of empire and innovation Rajesh Sagar; 14. The India twist to patent culture: investigating its history Tania Sebastian; 15. The life and times of patent no. 2,670: industrial property and public knowledge in early twentieth-century Japan Kjell Ericson; Part VI. Epilogue: 16. Postscript Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf.