Source: https://zdoc.pub/european-intellectual-property-law.html
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Matched Legal Cases: ['sui generis', 'art 51', 'UKSC ', 'UKSC ', 'Arts 6', 'Arts 2', 'Arts 4', 'Art. 4', 'Arts 6', 'Art. 7', 'Art. 8', 'Art. 5', 'Art. 2', 'Art. 10', 'Arts 4', 'Art. 6', 'Art. 5', 'Arts 6', 'Art. 5', 'Art. 6', 'Arts 9', 'Art. 7', 'Art. 2', 'Arts 3', 'Art. 5', 'Art. 6', 'Arts 6', 'Art. 9', 'Art. 16']

European Intellectual Property Law - PDF Free Download
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European Intellectual Property Law JUSTINE PIL A BA/LLB Hons, PhD (Melbourne) Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford Research Fellow of the Institute of European and Comparative Law Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
PAUL L .C . TORREMANS Licentiaat in de Rechten (KU Leuven) Licentiaat in het Notariaat (Examencommissie van de Staat, Leuven) Geaggregeerde voor het HSO en het HOKT in de Rechten (KU Leuven) LLM (Leicester) PhD (Leicester) Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Nottingham
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1 An Introduction to Domestic and International Intellectual Property Law 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The What, How, and Why of Domestic Intellectual Property Law
1.3 The What, How, and Why of International Intellectual Property Law
1.1 Introduction In recent decades, advances in technology and a rapidly globalizing economy have made expressive and informational subject matter increasingly important, and issues surrounding their use increasingly difficult to define and resolve. Meeting these challenges is the central task of the intellectual property (IP) system. According to its supporters, IP systems and the laws on which they are based protect individual rights and interests, promote innovation, culture, creativity, and social participation, support the growth and smooth functioning of competitive markets, and are of enormous importance for business, outstripping the importance of physical (tangible) assets. Regarding their importance for trade and industry specifically, a study by the European Patent Office (EPO) and Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) (OHIM) in September 2013 found that during the three-year period from 2008 to 2010, IP-intensive industries were responsible for generating: (a) almost 26 per cent of all jobs in the EU (56.5 out of 218 million), increasing to 35.1 per cent if jobs in industries supplying goods and services to IP-intensive industries were counted; (b) almost 39 per cent of the EU’s total economic activity (gross domestic product, GDP), valued at €4.7 trillion; and (c) most of the EU’s trade with the rest of the world. In addition, the study reported that average weekly wages in IP-intensive industries were 41 per cent higher than in non-IP-intensive industries, at €715 compared with €507.1 So too a study commissioned by the British Government in 2011 estimated global trade in IP licensing alone to be worth more than €819 billion a year: ‘five per cent of world trade 1 EPO and OHIM, ‘IPR intensive industries contribution to the Economic Performance and Employment in the European Union’ (Industry-Level Analysis Report, September 2013) [2.1]. See also EY, ‘Creating Growth: Measuring Cultural and Creative Markets in the EU’ (December 2014), estimating the creative and cultural industries specifically to account for 4.2 per cent of the EU’s GDP and nearly 7 million jobs, primarily in small businesses.
Introduc tion to Domes tic and International IP L aw
and rising’. 2 When combined with the other perceived benefits of IP recognition and protection outlined above, such evidence explains the centrality of IP to European social and economic policies. In this first chapter we commence our introduction to the European law of IP by introducing the domestic and international IP systems that preceded and continue to exist alongside it. Our starting point is the ‘what, how, and why’ of IP law in general: what it is, how it came to be, and why it exists. This discussion will lay the groundwork for an introduction to the EU law of IP in Chapter 2 and a more detailed study of theoretical accounts of European IP in Chapter 3. By devoting space in Part I to history and theory, our aim is to illustrate foundational aspects of the legal field studied in later parts, and to enable a fuller understanding of its substantive rules than would be possible without some awareness of their historical and normative underpinnings. Another natural starting point for thinking about the European law of IP is with the different forms of international cooperation that preceded and continue to be developed alongside it. One reason is that international initiatives in IP share many of the aims of European initiatives, including addressing the problems created by domestic IP territoriality. Another is that the international IP system represents an explicit legal basis and framework for the European IP system. And a third is that most of the international instruments comprising this system generate legal effects within the EU legal order and may thus be counted as sources of European IP law. In this chapter we therefore follow our discussion of the what, how, and why of IP law in general with an account of the what, how, and why of the international law of IP specifically.
1.2 The What, How, and Why of Domestic Intellectual Property Law 1.2.1 What is Intellectual Property Law? IP law is the area of law concerned with the recognition and protection of private rights in respect of expressive and informational subject matter (intellectual products), from authorial works and broadcasts to inventions, signs of commercial origin, aspects of product appearance, and confidential information. It is most commonly conceived as a mechanism for balancing competing rights and interests in respect of these subject matter, or as a tool for regulating access to their benefits. Included within the general category of IP rights are: copyright and related rights, referred to also as authors’ rights and neighbouring rights respectively; patents and plant variety rights; trade marks, geographical indications, and design rights; and certain additional sui generis rights in respect of information and data. This is shown in Figure 1.1. In the terminology of European law, all but copyright and related rights fall within the general category of ‘industrial property’ rights, most of which are distinguished by their concern with industrial or commercial subject matter and activities. With a small number of exceptions, all IP rights are property rights and share the main characteristics of other property rights. Thus, they confer a set of transferable (albeit not necessarily assignable) exclusionary rights in respect of a discrete and definable object, and are enforceable by their owner or the state in civil or criminal proceedings. In this sense IP rights are negative rather than positive, since they confer only the right to prohibit others from using the object to which they attach without also 2 I. Hargreaves, ‘Digital Opportunity: Review of Intellectual Property and Growth’ (18 May 2011) https:// www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-opportunity-review-of-intellectual-property-and-growth, 3.
The What, How, and Why of Domes tic IP L aw
Copyright & Related Rights (authorial works, performances, broadcasts, film, broadcast and performance fixations, and phonograms) (Discussed in Part III)
Rights in Data & Information
Patents & Allied Rights
(trade secrets, private information, data, and databases) (Discussed in Part V)
(inventions, and plant varieties) (Discussed in Part II)
Trade Marks & Allied Rights (signs of commercial origin, competition, geographical indications, and aspects of design) (Discussed in Part IV)
Figure 1.1 IP rights and subject matter
conferring a right to use the object itself. While this distinction may seem semantic, it is important in the case of technological products such as medicines, and plant varieties, the commercial use of which requires separate regulatory approval from the state. When considering different species of IP right it is useful to think in terms of three things: the subject matter to which the rights attach; the uses of the subject matter which the law reserves to the holders of those rights; and the third party acts permitted notwithstanding the rights’ subsistence. An overview of these aspects of copyright, patents, trade marks, and designs is given in Figure 1.2.
1.2.2 The How and Why of Intellectual Property Law 1.2.2.1 Theoretical Accounts of the Existence of IP Law Throughout its more than 600-year history, the law of IP has been dogged by persistent disagreement over its normative foundations, and whether they are sufficient to account for the various IP regimes that exist. Particularly heated have been the debates over the classification of IP rights as property rights because of its perceived implications for their nature, scope, and enforceability, and over the capacity of IP systems to accommodate new technologies such as film, the Internet, and biotechnology. A common starting point for these debates has been the intangible nature of the subject matter that IP rights protect. For example, as an authorial work protectable by copyright, a musical tune is a combination of sounds that exists separate from any printed score, compact disk, or other physical object on which those sounds may be recorded. Similarly, as an invention protectable by a patent, a medicine is an idea for a product that can be manufactured and used to improve human health that exists separate from any manufactured pharmaceutical substances themselves. And finally, as a sign indicating the origin of certain manufactured goods, each of the NIKE mark and its associated Swoosh design exists separate from its material instantiations on articles of clothing or sports equipment, etc.
PROTECTED IP SUBJECT MATTER
USES RESERVED TO THE IP OWNER
EXCEPTIONS (THIRD PARTY USES PERMITTED)
Published/unpublished authorial works—registration not required (copyright)
Reproduction, publication, etc. for life of author + 70 years (copyright)
Use for educational, expressive, equality, etc. purposes (copyright)
Published inventions—registration required (patents)
Use, supply, etc. for 20 years max. (patents)
Use for research, experimentation, etc. purposes (patents)
Published signs of commercial origin—registration required (trade marks)
Use in trade as a sign of origin, etc. indefinitely (trade marks)
Use of own name, etc. (trade marks)
Published product designs— registration optional (designs)
Reproduction, supply, etc. for 3 years (unregistered designs) or use, supply, etc. for 25 years max. (registered designs)
Use for private and non-commercial purposes, etc. (designs)
Figure 1.2 Defining features of the main types of IP right under European law
Hence the distinction between the intangible subject matter protected by IP rights and their tangible manifestations, which distinction is central to the law and practice in this field. The intangibility of intellectual products is generally regarded as creating immediate difficulties for those seeking to justify the recognition and protection of IP rights. The reason is that property rights typically subsist in tangible objects, such as land and chairs, and are commonly explained with reference to either: (a) the natural derivation of exclusionary rights from those objects by virtue of their tangibility; or (b) the endorsement of exclusionary rights in respect of those objects by the state as a means of preventing the damage that would be caused to them, and the social conflict that would arise among members of the public, if people were free to occupy and use them simultaneously. However, the non-crowdability and non-depletability of intellectual products makes each of these explanations unconvincing in their case. Specifically, while only one person can occupy a chair at any particular time, and each use of a chair will limit its life, any number of people can simultaneously read the same poem or apply the same mark to their goods, and reading a poem or applying a mark will have no impact on its ability to be used by others. It follows that intellectual products are incapable of supporting exclusive occupation, and thus incapable of supporting exclusionary rights derived from nature. If IP rights are to exist, they must therefore be artificially created by the state.3 However, for the state to create exclusionary rights where none exists naturally requires clear justification because of the restrictions on public freedoms which those rights entail. One possible justification could be preventing damage and social conflict, consistent with (b) above. On the other hand, the non-crowdability and non-depletability of intellectual products 3 M. Lehmann, ‘The Theory of Property Rights and the Protection of Intellectual and Industrial Property’ (1985) 16 IIC 525, 531.
suggests that allowing unlimited public access to them would neither damage them nor cause social conflict. It follows that if the state is to recognize IP rights, an alternative justification must be found. In the view of some, no such justification exists. Thus, it has been said, IP rights exist for essentially historical and pragmatic reasons, and while our investment in them is sufficient to make their abolition infeasible, they have no positive justification as such. In the frequently quoted words of Fritz Machlup: If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.4
So too, it has been said, for other IP rights. The argument that IP rights exist for essentially historical and pragmatic reasons alludes to the value of history in understanding them. In particular, an understanding of the origins of IP offers an empirical account of its existence in the absence of an accepted normative account. In addition, it offers an insight into the considerations and values that drove the emergence and early development of IP among European states, and in so doing allows us to identify certain themes and principles of importance for contemporary European IP law. These include themes and principles that express the values common to Member States on which European union is based, the ‘spiritual and moral heritage’ that European law seeks to preserve, and the ‘cultures and traditions’ of peoples whose diversity European law seeks to respect.5
1.2.2.2 Historical Accounts of the Existence of IP Law Any discussion of the origins of IP law in the space available here will be necessarily selective. In the discussion that follows we focus on a small number of events that may be said to have especial significance for the three paradigm IP regimes: copyright, patents, and trade marks.6 For copyright they are the themes illustrated in Figure 1.3, namely, the recognition of the idea of authorial property in the classical Roman period, the recognition of ownership rights in respect of literary reproductions in the Middle Ages, the grant of ‘rights of copy’ to limit the use of new technologies to reproduce and distribute information and ideas in the 16th century, and the emergence of the first common law and civil law copyright enactments in the 18th century. For patents they are the grant of privileges to reward or encourage innovation from 500 bce, the introduction of the first general patent statute in the 15th century, the recognition of patents as exceptions to a general prohibition against ‘odious monopolies’ in the 17th century, the establishment of patent examination systems in the 18th century, and the so-called ‘patent wars’ of the 19th century. And finally, for trade marks, they are 4 F. Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System: Study of the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Committee on the Judiciary (US Govt Printing Office, 1958) 80. 5 See Preamble, Articles 2, 3, and 6 TEU; Preamble CFR. As we will see, the protection of intellectual property is among the fundamental rights recognized by the CFR (Article 17(2)). 6 Compare the designs regime, which is generally regarded as a hybrid of the copyright, patents, and even trade marks regimes, consistent with the combined aesthetic and industrial (including source-indicating) character of design itself, and with its origins and early development in Europe as part of the copyright and industrial property systems respectively. See further nn 13 and 28; also Finniss (n 49) regarding the development of the designs regime in France; and R. Deazley, ‘Commentary on the Calico Printers’ Act 1787’ in L. Bently and M. Kretschmer (eds), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900) (1980) http://www. copyrighthistory.org, regarding the first designs regime of England.
Circa 560 ce, Ireland
16th C, various states
18th C, England, Denmark, & France
• Idea of authorial property recognized
• Ownership rights of book owners in respect of book copies recognized
• Monopoly rights in respect of printing technology granted to regulate the use of industry and control the dissemination of information and ideas
• Limited property rights of authors in respect of their works recognized
Figure 1.3 Events in the emergence of copyright
the use of marks to indicate the ownership and commercial origin of goods beginning in ancient times, and the recognition of the right of a trader to prevent others from causing deceit by applying his sign of commercial origin to their goods in the 17th century. Before commencing our discussion of these events, it may be useful to introduce two analytical frameworks and reference points for understanding each and its significance. The first is the distinction between private and public law, and the idea of IP law as private law and IP rights as private rights. Already in this chapter we have seen two different accounts of property as rights of exclusive occupation derived from nature and as artificial regulatory instruments created by the state respectively. Whatever the normative validity of these accounts (to which we return in Sections 3.4 and 3.6), in practice the recognition and protection of IP rights have tended to follow a decision by a recognized public authority to endorse the claim of an individual in respect of a specific subject matter through the grant of limited exclusionary rights ‘impressed with social obligations, and subjected to administrative interferences’.7 Thus, while IP rights satisfy most definitions of private rights by reason of their enforceability against other individuals, they also have (and have always had) a strong public law dimension in their conferral of rights and obligations on individuals vis-à-vis society and the state. In addition, this public law dimension of IP has been accentuated at the European level by the political and constitutional orientation of European legal communities. Among other things, that orientation is reflected in the teleological, purposive, and systemic methods applied by European tribunals when interpreting substantive rules, and the emphasis given in those interpretations to the social, economic, and political—as well as the historical—context in which the rules exist and operate. The second analytical framework connects to this idea of IP as situated at the interface of the public/private law and rights divide. Its focus is the variety of extra-legal
7 F.D. Prager, ‘A History of Intellectual Property From 1545 to 1787’ (1944) 26 Journal of the Patent Office Society 711, 717.
mechanisms by which people are excluded from products, and the way in which these mechanisms work together and affect the need for intervention by the state through the recognition and protection of property. This is a key insight of Lawrence Lessig, who identifies three extra-legal mechanisms as having especial importance for IP: social norms, the market, and real-space access restrictions (architecture). According to Lessig: Property is protected by the sum of the different protections that law, norms, the market, and real-space code yield. . . . From the point of view of the state, we need law only when the other three modalities leave property vulnerable. From the point of view of the citizen, real-space code (such as locks) is needed when laws and norms alone do not protect enough. Understanding how property is protected means understanding how these different protections work together.8
Once again, the early European experience of IP is more clearly understood with this paradigm in mind. For example, the paradigm helps us to see and assess that experience in terms of the connections that exist between IP rights, the economy, technology, and the social norms of different rights-endorsing societies, and in so doing to understand the significance of that experience and those connections for the substantive rules of European IP law today. 1.2.2.2.1 The Origins of Copyright
The recognition of authorial property in the classical Roman period While the first copyright legislation was not introduced until the 18th century, the roots of copyright can be traced to the classical Roman period, where the idea of authorial property was already recognized and accepted. According to Roman law principles of accessio, for example, if a person painted a picture on another person’s canvas she thereby acquired ownership of the canvas.9 Hence, from the earliest times acts of authorship have been recognized in European communities as capable of supporting property rights. So too the idea of authorial property can be seen in the social norms of plagiarism that existed during this period. Derived from the Latin word ‘plagium’, meaning to steal another’s slave or child, one of the earliest known uses of the term ‘plagiarism’ is in a charge of literary theft made by Martialis in the first century ce, reported as follows: It is said, Fidentinus, that in reciting my verses you always speak of them as your own. If you are willing to credit them to me, I will send them to you gratis. If, however, you wish to have them called your verses, you had better buy them, when they will no longer belong to me.10
Once again, the report of Martialis’s words offers evidence of the early recognition of the idea of authors’ rights—including here the right of authors to insist on the attribution of their works—and of the conception of those rights as objects of value capable of being traded on the market. In the use of the term ‘plagiarism’ itself one also sees evidence of the early conception of authorial works as metaphorical slaves or children of their authors, and of authors as harmed economically and emotionally by their unauthorized use.
L. Lessig, Code: Version 2 (Basic Books, 2006) 171. Cf W.W. Buckland, A Text-Book of Roman Law: From Augustus to Justinian (3rd edn revised by Peter Stein, CUP, 1963) 210. By contrast, if a person wrote on another person’s parchment her writing ceded to the parchment. 10 G.H. Putnam, Authors and their Public, in Ancient Times: A Sketch of Literary Conditions and of the Relations With the Public of Literary Producers, from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Roman Empire (1896) 234. 8
The recognition of ownership rights in respect of literary reproductions in the Middle Ages The idea of authorial works as objects of both personal and property rights was also apparent in the Middle Ages, when the famous Cathach of Columba case was heard, resulting in the world’s first reported copyright judgment. This case concerned the unauthorized copying by an Irish missionary, Columba, of a book of psalms owned by Finnian and kept in the locked library of his monastery. While visiting the monastery, Columba, an enthusiastic and prolific scribe, broke into Finnian’s library and began to copy the book of psalms. He was caught and brought before King Dermot of Ireland, to whom he reportedly pleaded that as Finnian’s book has not decreased in value because of the transcript I have made from it; also that it is not right to extinguish the divine things it contained, or to prevent me or anybody else from copying it, or reading it, or circulating it throughout the provinces. I further maintain that if I benefited by its transcription, which I desired to be for the general good, provided no injury accrued to Finnian or his book thereby, it was quite permissible for me to copy it!11
To which King Dermot is said to have replied: ‘To every cow her calf, to every book belongs its transcript. Therefore the copy you have made, O Colum Cille, belongs to Finnian.’12 This frequently cited exchange between Columba and King Dermot from the 6th century is of significance for four reasons. The first is its recognition of the separateness of tangible goods (the book) and intangible expression (the psalms), and of the possibility of the latter supporting property rights separate from the property rights supported by the former. Thus, while it was clear that Finnian owned the book, it was not clear that he had any rights in respect of the psalms recorded in the book, and it was this issue that the king was asked to decide. The second is its recognition of the significance of the intangible nature of authorial works for the subsistence of property rights in respect of them. Implicit in Columba’s argument was that since copying the psalms would facilitate public access to them without reducing their value, preventing such copying could not be justified. In his response King Dermot did not address this argument, relying instead on Finnian’s ownership of the book as giving him ownership of the unauthorized copy which Columba had made. Which leads to the third point of interest regarding the exchange, namely, the king’s invocation of the paternity metaphor (‘to every cow her calf . . . ’) to justify the recognition of Finnian’s rights, consistent with the plagiary metaphor above, and supporting the idea of unauthorized copying as contrary to natural law and the values of civil society. There remains the fourth and final reason for interest in the exchange between Columba and King Dermot, which lies in its demonstration of the variety of extralegal mechanisms by which authorial works are protected, and the way in which those mechanisms work together and affect the need for intervention by the state. As discussed earlier, this is a key insight of Lessig, who identifies three extra-legal mechanisms as having especial importance for IP: social norms, the market, and architecture. Through this paradigm, illustrated in Figure 1.4, Lessig offers an explanation for both the absence of copyright in the Middle Ages and its emergence and development in later centuries. The explanation for its absence in the Middle Ages lies in the lack of 11 L. Menzies, Saint Columba of Iona: a study of his life, his times, & his influence (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1920) 25. 12 ibid.
– willingness of individuals to pay for access – opportunities for middlemen to secure access for payment
– public desire for access – public belief that access is appropriate
Individuals Technology – real (physical) opportunities for unauthorized (including undetectable) access – real (physical) restrictions imposed by authors and others in possession/control of authorial works to prevent unauthorized access
Law (including Copyright) – regulatory restrictions imposed by the state to discourage unauthorized access
Figure 1.4 Lessig’s copyright paradigm
reprographic technology and low literacy rates which then existed, and the consequential ability of authors and others to restrict access to works by keeping them in a locked room, as Finnian had done. When literacy rates increased and printing technologies became available in the 15th century, however, the situation changed, creating a perceived need for legal intervention to prevent unauthorized copying. And when digital technology was invented in the 20th century and unauthorized copying became a widespread activity for members of the public as well as commercial enterprises, the situation changed again, creating a perceived need for further legal intervention in order both to strengthen copyright, and to support owners’ renewed reliance on extra-legal mechanisms to prevent unauthorized use of their protected subject matter. One such extra-legal mechanism in widespread use today is technological protection measures—so-called digital locks—which are commonly applied to protected works and subject matter in digital form so as to prevent their reproduction and distribution, and the use of which the law supports by making it an offence to circumvent them without the permission of the IP rights owner. In an era of widespread infringement and public scepticism regarding the legitimacy of copyright, this renewed reliance on extralegal mechanisms to prevent the unauthorized use of works and subject matter—and the law’s support of that reliance—can be read as reflecting the recognition that in the Internet era, ‘laws and norms do not protect enough’.
The grant of rights of copy to limit the use of new technologies for the purpose of circulating ideas and information in the 16th century The threat posed by printing technology While the idea of authorial property was well established by the Middle Ages, it acquired a new significance with the arrival in the West of printing technology; an event that triggered profound changes in social practices and conceptions of authorial production, and that raised new issues regarding the public dissemination of information and ideas. Perceiving immediately the threat posed by such dissemination to social and political order, the Crown in England and France, following the Venetian Senate, responded by prohibiting the general public from using the new printing technology. To that end each created printing monopolies—exclusive rights of copy—and conferred them on individual printers in respect of specific works, or on companies of printers in
exchange for an undertaking only to print works approved for public circulation. Hence the so-called copy-right systems that resulted, which were systems of trade regulation aimed at controlling what was published and to that end restricting public access to reprographic technologies through the grant of printing and publishing monopolies.13 Early examples of individual grants made under such systems include the 1469 award by the Venetian Senate of a five-year monopoly over the printing of the letters of Cicero and Pliny to the German printer, Johannes de Spira, and the 1528 grant by the German Emperor Maximilian of a monopoly over the publication of the works of Albrecht Dürer to Dürer’s widow. The economic and social aspects of reproduction and distribution rights The copy-right systems of the 16th century were the immediate precursors of the first copyright enactments, and underline the economic and social aspects of the reproduction and other rights which those enactments recognized. For example, the ability to produce multiple high-quality copies of a single work at marginal additional cost and to make those copies available to an increasingly literate public for purchase created a new market in authorial works that was said to benefit three groups of people. The first group were the printers themselves, as the persons entitled to produce the copies and sell them to the public, who stood to benefit economically from their exclusive copy-rights. The second were the authors of the individual manuscripts that were printed, as the persons who possessed the physical objects (the manuscripts) to which the printers needed access in order to be able to produce their copies, who also stood to benefit economically from the sale of their individual manuscripts to the printers (the value of which could be expected to increase as their reputations grew with the printers’ sale of copies of those manuscripts). And the third group were the members of the public, as the purchasers of the printed copies of the authors’ manuscripts, who benefited personally from the increased access to information and ideas which the availability of such copies ensured, and who could also be expected to pass those benefits on to their wider community through increased engagement in its social, cultural, and political life. On the other hand, the extent of such access and its benefits depended on the price charged by the printers for the copies and on the manuscripts chosen by the printers and authorized by the Crown for printing and distribution. Market-based censorship A hallmark of modern copyright systems is the absence of any day-to-day role for the state in deciding which individual works and beneficiaries receive legal protection. As with the printers’ systems of the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the value of such protection continues to be determined largely by the market, with publishers and other middlemen also playing an important role in deciding which works are made available to the public based on their assessment of which works are likely to be a commercial success. The result is a system that encourages the creation and publication of popular works, and that discriminates against works likely to be of interest to a small section of
13 A similar system was introduced in 18th century France to accord separate IP protection for industrial designs (comprising aspects of product appearance). Thus, under a 1711 regulation enacted by the guild of Lyons, the Conseil des Prud’hommes was conferred a monopoly over the production of silk by the use of weaving looms. By the end of the 18th century the law had been amended to recognize ‘new designs’ as the ‘property’ of their ‘inventor’ for a term of 15 years, conditional upon the deposit of samples of the relevant design in the Conseil’s archives, bringing the protection of non-authorial designs squarely within the industrial property paradigm discussed later.
the public only, or likely to have a long shelf life, i.e. to realize their commercial value over a long period. In the past this has led to criticism of the copyright system for promoting creation and publication without regard to the quality or diversity of what is created and published. As we will see in Section 3.8, one response to such criticism has been to argue for a longer term of protection to enable creators and publishers to offset the costs of creating and publishing works and subject matter less likely to offer a strong and immediate financial return with a view to increasing not merely the number, but also the diversity, of the works and subject matter created and made available to the public. The impact of reproduction and distribution rights on public freedoms and participation Constructing a system that encourages the creation and dissemination of a diversity of authorial works and other expressive subject matter for the benefit of the public is an important aim of all modern copyright systems. So too ensuring that those systems do not impede creation and dissemination (and other valued activities, e.g. thought, expression, and artistic discourse) by restricting public access to protected works and subject matter more than they encourage such access is and has always been a central concern. The impact of reproduction rights on public freedoms and democratic participation were first discussed at length in the context of the copy-right systems in the 17th century. In England the trigger for that discussion was the trade war that broke out between the Stationers’ Company upon which monopoly rights of printing were conferred and provincial booksellers who took to selling copies of manuscripts without acquiring the necessary permissions. According to the Stationers, by creating a valuable market for authorial works, their monopolies ensured that authors were acknowledged and paid for their authorial efforts and that the public received access to their new and valuable manuscripts. According to the rival booksellers, by contrast, the Stationers’ monopolies caused harm to the public by enabling books to be sold at inflated prices and restricting the freedom of third parties to access their contents. In these diametrically opposed positions one sees the language of ‘authors’ rights’ and ‘the public interest’ so pervasive in modern copyright debates. In addition, one sees in the printers’ and booksellers’ positions an early allusion to different conceptions of copyright itself: the printers’ case reflecting a view of authors’ works as valuable products of authorial labour capable of supporting property rights, and the booksellers’ case reflecting a view of authors’ works as repositories of ideas and information to which the public had a right of access which the new technology of print (ought to have) facilitated. The competing conceptions were even more apparent in France, where the freedom to print and distribute ideas and information without needing first to obtain the privilege of printing from the king was won with the Revolution, and freedom of communication recognized in 1789 alongside the inviolability and sacredness of property in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.14 The English Stationers’ system collapsed under the weight of the printers’ and booksellers’ trade war at the end of the 17th century, with the copy-right systems of other European states following thereafter. In their place emerged the world’s first civil and common law copyright enactments, starting with the English Statute of Anne 1710 and the Danish copyright ordinance of 1741.
14 See P. Drahos, ‘Intellectual Property and Human Rights’ [1999] IPQ 349, 351–2. According to Drahos, during the 1750s 40 per cent of those in the Bastille were there because of offences related to the book trade.
The first common and civil law copyright enactments of the 18th century According to its preamble, the Statute of Anne was introduced to ‘encourage learned men to compose and write useful books’, and to protect the ‘authors or proprietors’ of such books from ‘ruinous’ piracy. To that end it did two things of significance: first, it extended the Stationers’ then existing monopolies for a further limited period; and second, it created a renewable, 14-year exclusive right to make literal or near-literal copies of books, vesting in authors on their publication, subject to their registration and deposit, and enforceable by its owner against the world. The full title of the Statute of Anne was ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned’. Consistent with this title, the Statute is often described as reflecting a public interest or instrumentalist view of copyright, according to which authors’ rights are privileges granted by a state for the purpose of encouraging the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of its citizens. So too for the Danish ordinance of 1741, which prohibited any person from copying or selling a copy of any book or manuscript in respect of which another person from Copenhagen, whether or not the author of the book or manuscript, had acquired a lawful right and incurred ‘a considerable expense’.15 These earliest copyright enactments of England and Denmark can be contrasted with the French droit d’auteur (authors’ rights) decrees of the 1790s. According to Le Chapelier when reporting the first of these during the Revolution in 1791, ‘the most sacred, the most legitimate, the most unassailable, and . . . the most personal of all properties, is the work which is the fruit of the writer’s thoughts’.16 While made with respect to unpublished works, this statement underlines key aspects of the French enactments and their difference from the English and Danish laws. For example, the 1791 decree gave authors the exclusive right to perform their dramatic and musical works in public, vesting on creation of the work and lasting for the term of the author’s life plus five years. In 1792 it was replaced by a further decree, aimed expressly at strengthening the rights of authors in the face of theatre owners’ failure to pay the sums demanded for permission to perform their works, and supplementing their right of public performance with a new right of publication. And in 1793, a third decree extended further the rights of authors to cover the reproduction of all authorial works, lasting for the term of the author’s life plus ten years.17 By the 1880s, all European states had introduced legislation recognizing and protecting the rights of authors, including Spain (in 1834), Austria (in 1846), Portugal (in 1867), Denmark (in 1857), Sweden (in 1867), Germany (in 1870), and Norway (in 1876), paving the way for the conclusion of the first international copyright treaty, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Property of 1886.18 Conclusions The previous discussion highlights three themes as having been especially important in the emergence and early development of copyright systems in Europe. The first is S.P. Ladas, The International Protection of Literary and Artistic Property (1938) vol. I, 18. Copyright and The Public Interest (Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law, 1994) 79 (quoting from Archives Parlementaires de 1787 á 1860, Receuil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des Chambres françaises (Paris, 1887) vol. xxii, 210). 17 J.C. Ginsburg, ‘Tale of Two Copyrights: Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America’ (1990) 64 Tulane Law Review 1007–9. 18 S. Ricketson and J.C. Ginsburg, International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond (2nd edn, OUP, 2005) [1.5]. 15
16 G. Davies,
a commitment to an individuated conception of authorship, premised on a view of authors as having a personal connection with and responsibility for the works they create. The second is a recognition of informational and expressive works as objects of economic and social (including cultural) value capable of supporting property rights. And the third is a concern to balance the claims of authors to protection of their creations and of service providers (e.g. printers and publishers) to protection of their commercial interests on the one hand, with the freedom of third parties to express and access ideas and information and to exploit fully the capacities of new technologies on the other. As we will see in later chapters, these three themes are also central to European law- and policy-making in IP, with the third in particular having dominated EU copyright initiatives. Among other things, they reveal the intimate connections that have existed between conceptions of IP at particular moments in history and the prevailing social norms and state of technology and the economy. In addition, they underline the centrality to copyright historically of the concern of law- and decisionmakers: (a) to recognize and protect individual creators’ rights while also taking account of the impact of doing so on social and economic welfare; and (b) to regulate trade in goods and (printing and other) services in pursuit of commercial (mercantilist) and social (censorial) policies. 1.2.2.2.2 The Origins of Industrial Property Rights
Patents for inventions The grant of privileges to reward or encourage innovation from ancient times The practice of granting patents for inventions has its origins in the idea, often traced to Sicily (then part of Greece) in 500 bce, of conferring exclusive manufacturing and other privileges as a reward or incentive for devising new and otherwise meritorious products and processes, including recipes for culinary dishes. This practice was also adopted by the early Romans, who reportedly rewarded their inventive citizens by exempting them from normal civic duties, such as military service.19 Much later, European states adopted the custom of conferring monopolies over different aspects of manufacture and trade on companies of merchants and craftsmen, and then, in the 14th century, of compromising those guild monopolies in order to encourage the development of local industry and the exploitation of local resources. States’ preferred method of doing this was to attract foreign workers with the promise of special trade privileges in exchange for a commitment to practise and train local apprentices in their trades and crafts. The English Crown reportedly made the first grant under this policy in 1331 to a wool weaver from Flanders, John Kempe. The first general patent statute and patent specification of the 15th and 16th centuries The early ‘letters of privilege’ described above tended to offer inducements other than monopoly grants. By the 15th century, however, the use of monopolies to encourage innovation was becoming common in the city-states of Italy; a frequently cited example being the 1421 grant to Filippo Brunelleschi by the Signoria of Florence of a three-year exclusive right to manufacture and use a new device for transporting heavy loads over rivers.20 In 1474 the first general patent statute was enacted in Venice, promising anyone who built
19 I. Mgbeoji, ‘The Juridical Origins of the International Patent System: Towards a Historiography of the Role of Patents in Industrialization’ (2003) 5 Journal of the History of International Law 403, 408–9. 20 A.A. Gomme, Patents of Invention: Origin and Growth of the Patent System in Britain (Longmans Green and Co., 1946) 6.
a new and useful device the exclusive right to manufacture it for ten years. In full this statute provided as follows: WE HAVE among us men of great genius, apt to invent and discover ingenious devices; and in view of the grandeur and virtue of our City, more such men come to us from divers parts. Now if provision were made for the works and devices discovered by such persons, so that others who may see them could not build them and take the inventor’s honor away, more men would then apply their genius, would discover, and would build devices of great utility and benefit to our Commonwealth. Therefore: BE IT ENACTED that, by the authority of this Council, every person who shall build any new and ingenious device in this City, not previously made in this Commonwealth, shall give notice of it to the office of our General Welfare Board when it has been reduced to perfection so that it can be used and operated. It being forbidden to every other person in any of our territories and towns to make any further device conforming with and similar to said one, without the consent and license of the author, for the term of 10 years. And if anybody builds it in violation hereof, the aforesaid author and inventor shall be entitled to have him summoned before any magistrate of this City, by which Magistrate the said infringer shall be constrained to pay him [one] hundred ducats; and the device shall be destroyed at once. It being, however, within the power and discretion of the Government, in its activities, to take and use any such device and instrument, with this condition however that no one but the author shall operate it.21
By the early 16th century, knowledge of the Italian practice of rewarding the introduction of new inventions with monopolies had spread to other European states, including France. In France, the first reported privilege of this type was a ten-year monopoly granted by King Henri II to Theseo Mutio of Bologna in 1551, restricted by the Parliament of Paris to five years, over a new method of manufacturing ‘glass, mirrors . . . and other sorts of Venetian style glass’.22 In the same year the king granted another ten-year monopoly to his mechanic, Abel Foullon, over an instrument for taking architectural measurements (a holometer) on condition that Foullon publish a description of his invention for use by the public when the patent expired. The resulting description of 1555 is generally thought to have been the first patent specification. Patents as exceptions to a general prohibition against ‘odious monopolies’ in 17th century England In England the patent policy of the 16th century remained vulnerable to abuse, and it was not long before a practice developed of granting extended monopolies as political rewards to individuals over the practice of established trades and the manufacture and sale of known devices. Well-known examples include the grant of patents for such basic and locally produced commodities as starch, salt, and vinegar. These so-called odious monopolies were devastating for trade and the public and provoked intense political opposition. This led in 1601 to a debate between the House of Commons and Crown over the scope of the latter’s power that ended with a royal promise to revoke the worst of the monopolies and recognize the future jurisdiction of the common law courts to determine their legality. That jurisdiction was tested in the Case of Monopolies (1602) 77 ER 1260, 21 G. Mandich, ‘Venetian Origins of Inventors’ Rights’ (1960) 42 Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society 378 (translated by F.D. Prager). 22 M. Pendergrast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (Basic Books, 2003) 149; R.A. Klitze, ‘Historical Background of the English Patent Law’ (1959) 41 Journal of the Patent Office 615, 619.
in which the King’s Bench established the general proposition that by reducing employment and encouraging manufacturers to raise their prices and lower their manufacturing standards, monopolies were contrary to the public interest and thus to the common law. However, the court also recognized a limited exception covering patents for new and useful trades and engines, reportedly justified with reference to the ‘charge or industry’ or ‘wit or invention’ which their introduction to the realm required. Despite this decision, the grant of odious monopolies continued, prompting further intervention by the Parliament and, finally, the introduction of the Statute of Monopolies 1623 (21 Jac. 1, c. 3). By that Act monopolies were declared ‘contrary to the law’ and ‘utterly void and of none effect’, with a limited exception in section 6 for the benefit of ‘true and first Inventor[s]‌’. That section remained the basis for the patent laws of the UK until the introduction of the European patent system in the 1970s, and continues to be the basis for the patent laws of Australia and New Zealand. The early patent examination systems of 17th century France Already under the Venetian patent system of the 15th century, monopolies were granted only after some formal examination of the inventions to which they related.23 So too in France there existed from 1632 a private organization known as the Free Academy the purpose of which was to promote discovery and the examination of inventions in support of patent grants. To give an example of its work: in 1634 the academy was asked by the then Prime Minister of France, Cardinal-Duke Richelieu, to examine the claim of a professor of mathematics, Jean-Baptiste Morin, to have invented a new, inventive, and useful method of determining the longitude of a ship. After a hearing involving expert testimony from Galileo, the academy rejected Professor Morin’s claims, leading to the government’s denial of a patent grant.24 Later in the 17th century, the role of conducting preliminary examinations of patent applications was formalized in France at the instigation of the Parliament, and delegated to a public body of scientific and technological experts, the Académie des Sciences (successor of the Free Academy). In 1699 the Académie received instructions to examine all inventions for which a privilege was sought; a role that had the further effect of publicizing the inventions before the grant of any Crown privilege was made.25 A contested idea: the patent wars of the 18th century In 1791, France followed England by introducing its first general patent legislation; and by the middle of the 19th century, so had Austria (in 1810), Russia (in 1812), Prussia (in 1815), Belgium and the Netherlands (in 1817), Spain (in 1820), Bavaria (in 1825), Sardinia (in 1826), the Vatican State (in 1833), Sweden (in 1834), Württemberg (in 1836), Portugal (in 1837), and Saxonia (in 1843).26 Of especial note regarding these early European enactments is the difference between them. At one extreme stood the 1791 French decree, which was introduced two years after property was declared an inviolable and sacred right in the Declaration of the Rights of 23 Prager (n 7) 716. This contrasts with the position in England, where there was no formal examination procedure. Instead, applicants for a patent grant were required formally to attest to the merit of their invention, and risked penalties for any false statements they might make in that regard. 24 T. Bakos and M. Nowotarski, ‘A Short History of Private Patent Examination’ (2009) Insurance IP Bulletin. 25 L. Hilaire-Pérez, ‘Invention and the State in 18th-Century France’ (1991) 32 Technology and Culture 911, 917. 26 I.F. Machlup and E. Penrose, ‘The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century’ (1950) 10 Journal of Economic History 1, 3.
Man and of the Citizen, and which declared that ‘every discovery or new invention, in all kinds of industry, is the property of its author’, and that ‘to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years’; the term being at the inventor’s discretion. Reflecting the view of patents as natural rights of an inventor, the practice of examining inventions was dispensed with, and the task of patent offices confined to processing applications to the state for a patent grant. As the text of the French patent document stated: ‘The government, in granting a patent without prior examination, does not in any manner guarantee either the priority, merit or success of an invention.’27 In addition, while patentees were required to describe their inventions sufficiently to enable them to be performed by a person skilled in the relevant art, their descriptions were once again suppressed until after the expiry of their property.28 In contrast to the French system were the systems of other states, perhaps none more so than the first national German patent system of 1877. Central features of the German system included: (a) preliminary substantive examination of the relevant invention, including for inventive height; (b) policy-based exclusions from protection for medicinal, chemical, and food products; (c) restriction of entitlement to the first to file for a patent, regardless of whether he was first to devise the invention; (d) a requirement that patent applicants provide a written description of the invention for publication before the grant, and that patentees pay increasing annual renewal fees to maintain the grant over its (maximum) 15-year period; and (e) a requirement that patentees work their inventions within three years of the grant, and allow others to work them at any time for reasonable payment.29 So demanding were these requirements that between 1877 and 1913, only 304,057 patents were granted from a total number of 765,653 applications,30 prompting Germany to introduce a second utility model system in 1891 to protect less meritorious inventions. Soon after the last of the patent law enactments referred to earlier was introduced, there ensued a period of intense political and public controversy as supporters of free trade in Germany and other European states sought the abolition of existing (and the rejection of proposed) domestic patent laws due to the harm they were said to cause for innovation, industry, and the general public.31 At the height of the controversy, in 1869, the Netherlands went so far as to repeal its patent legislation. By the following decade, however, patent advocates had won the war, and by the end of the 1870s debates on the
27 B.Z. Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyright in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 (CUP, 2005) 43. 28 As noted earlier (n 13) principles of the 18th century patent system of France were also extended to industrial designs. (For a description see House of Commons, Report from Select Committee on the Silk Trade (2 August 1832) [8849].) From 1793, the French system of design patents was supplemented by copyright for authors under the 1793 authors’ rights decree; a decree later amended to confirm the availability of authorial property for works regardless of merit. The resulting system of dual (patent and copyright) protection for designs in their dual capacities as functional and expressive subject matter respectively supported the then emergent distinction between copyright and industrial property themselves, on which the Paris and Berne Conventions of the late 19th century were based. As we will see later, this distinction is preserved in European law today. With respect to designs themselves, aspects of product appearance also function as signs of use in industry, and may accordingly be protected by the law of trade marks, making them a truly hybrid form of intellectual property. 29 See B.Z. Khan, ‘An Economic History of Patent Institutions’ http://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economichistory-of-patent-institutions/; D. Guellec and B. van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, The Economics of the European Patent System: IP Policy for Innovation and Competition (OUP, 2007) ch. 2. 30 C. Burhop, The Transfer of Patents in Imperial Germany (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2009/26) 6. 31 For a discussion see Machlup and Penrose (n 26).
existence of the patent system had all but ended, paving the way for the conclusion of the first international patent treaty, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883.
Signs of commercial origin (trade marks) The use of marks to indicate the ownership and commercial origin of goods from ancient times The practice in ancient times of applying marks of ownership and origin to goods, such as pottery and livestock, may be the earliest evidence of the idea of IP. By the Middle Ages this practice was well established in different parts of Europe, both as a voluntary measure by which merchants secured their title to goods in the event of loss or theft, and as a compulsory measure by which the state regulated trade.32 To give an example of the voluntary use of marks: in 1332, one year after the first recorded patent grant to John Kempe, merchants from Majorca succeeded in recovering goods thrown up on the coast of Flanders by a shipwreck in the high court of Seville by proving ownership and long use of the mark appearing on the goods.33 There followed in 1353 a statute of England (27 Edw. 3) enabling a foreign merchant who had lost his goods to rely on proof of ownership of marks appearing on them as proof of their ownership, which was applied by the courts until the end of the 18th century.34 To give an example of the compulsory use of ownership marks: the governing charters of the merchant guilds of medieval Europe routinely required the affixing of two marks on merchants’ goods—one of the guild under whose monopoly the goods were produced, and one of the individual merchant within that guild responsible for producing them—as a means of tracing their origins in the event of the goods being defective or otherwise produced in breach of guild monopoly rules. Recognition of the right of a trader to prevent others from causing deceit by applying his mark to their goods in 17th century England The first formal recognition of the principle of trade mark law supposedly came with the decision of the English court in Southern v How (1656) Pop R 144. According to the report of that case: [T]‌he action upon the case was brought in the Common Pleas by a clothier, that whereas he had gained great reputation for his making of his cloth by reason whereof he had great utterance to his benefit and profit, and that he used to set his mark on his cloth whereby it should be known to be his cloth: and another clothier, observing it, used the same mark to his ill-made cloth on purpose to deceive him, and it was resolved that the action did well lie.
While the authority and influence of this case has been contested, its report remains important evidence of the early judicial recognition of the principle of trade mark law. According to that principle in its original formulation, trade mark law applied defensively, to prevent a trader from affixing another’s sign of origin to his own goods on the ground that doing so would deceive the public as to their origin. This consumer-focused and deceit-based formulation of trade mark protection is consistent with the early guild requirement that signs be affixed to goods to enable their ownership and commercial 32 See E.S. Rogers, ‘Some Historical Matter Concerning Trade-Marks’ (1910) 9 Michigan Law Review 29, 43. 33 F.I. Schechter, The Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to Trade-Marks (Columbia University Press, 1925) 26–7. 34 ibid 29–31.
origin to be established, and the related guild prohibition against signs being used as a means of distinguishing and advertising the goods of individual merchants themselves.35 It recognized an accessorial or dependent form of protection that was noticeably different from the independent protection conferred by copyright and patents. Specifically, while the economic value of a patented invention or copyright work was determined directly by the patent or copyright itself, the value of an article to which a mark had been affixed was determined by the article and not the mark; the latter operating merely as a means of communicating to the public the article’s origin.36
Conclusions The themes that emerge from the previous discussion of the origins of industrial property rights are similar to those identified in our discussion of the origins of copyright. For example, the view of early patentees as meriting industrial property grants by reason of their ‘charge or industry’ or ‘wit or invention’ alludes to a view of inventors as deserving such grants by reason of their intellectual endeavours and/or capacities. So too, according to Prager, the restriction of early patent grants to the inventor’s life suggested a conception of patents ‘as strictly personal’, even as they were exploited ‘in purely capitalistic ways’.37 On the other hand, a primary motivation for granting patents in all civil and common law jurisdictions was the instrumentalist one of encouraging individuals to enhance the industrial capacity of the local community by devising or introducing from abroad new industrial and commercial ideas. Hence, even in France, where patents after 1791 were granted in vindication of inventors’ natural law rights without formal examination of the invention to which they related, individual invention per se was not required to secure a grant, and patentees were obliged in all cases to introduce their inventions into practice within a specified period. So too the earliest recognition of the right of trade mark owners to exclude others from using their marks was motivated by the utilitarian concern to promote fair competition among traders, including by preventing them from deceiving the public as to the origin of their goods. Implicit was a view of industrial property rights as mechanisms for regulating trade in support of then existing economic policies focused on generating wealth and promoting industry. A central focus in that regard was restricting competition among individuals in order to encourage industrial and commercial innovation. Specifically, by restricting competition in the production of goods and services, industrial property rights were believed to promote competition at the higher innovation level, much as property rights in respect of tangible products promote competition at the production level by restricting competition in the consumption of individual goods and services.38 1.2.2.3 Theories and Values of Intellectual Property The previous discussion suggests a range of social and economic values to have driven the emergence and early development of domestic IP laws and systems. These include: individual (expressive and financial) autonomy; social and political participation; fair trade and competition; freedom of expression; industrial and commercial innovation; consumer protection; and access to new technologies. It also suggests that these values were given different emphasis by different states and in the context of different IP regimes: individual autonomy having had especial importance for copyright, innovation especial importance 35 ibid 47.
36 Lehmann (n 3) 531–2; also R.A. Posner, ‘The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property’ (2002) Daedalus 5, 8. 37 n 6, 717. 38 Lehmann (n 3) 537 et seq.
for patent monopolies, and fair trade and consumer protection especial importance for trade marks. And finally, it suggests at least two foundational theories of IP focused on the protection of individuals’ natural law rights and the promotion of public interests respectively, localized in different European states. 1.2.2.3.1 Deontological Theories and Values Natural law or deontological theories of IP are best captured by the statement of Le Chapelier, when presenting the French Playwrights Decree of 1791, that ‘[t]‌he most sacred, the most legitimate, the most unassailable, and, I may say, the most personal of all properties, is the work which is the fruit of a writer’s thoughts.’ The implication of this statement is that the law recognizes property rights in the products of authorial (and other forms of intellectual) labour in the belief: (a) that the nature or value of such labour or of the products themselves merits such recognition; and/or (b) that such recognition is necessary or desirable, either to enable individual creators to flourish as autonomous human beings, or to protect their rights in respect of their personhood or intellectual labour. Deontological arguments for IP depend on a belief in individual creation that many regard today with scepticism or reject as little more than a Romantic cliché. In addition, however, even those who support moral rights arguments for IP are likely to find them more compelling for some regimes than for others. For example, many would accept that a poet has a moral claim to exclude third parties from certain uses of her poems on the basis that poems are private expressions of an individual and/or have a value to society that ought to be recognized. Less obvious is whether either of these propositions supports the grant of property rights in respect of all works of poetry and, if it does, how those rights are most appropriately defined. For example, if we value the work that poets do, we might prefer to pay them a salary or lump sum for every work of poetry that they produce, and/or to offer rewards for individual works of poetry that we judge to have particular merit. In addition, if we believe that poetry ought to be protected in the manner of other private expressions of an individual, we might prefer to recognize poets as having a personal right to determine the readiness of their works for publication—perhaps with additional rights to control the presentation of their works once published—rather than the more widely cast transferrable rights of exclusion conferred by IP. And finally, even if we support the recognition and protection of IP rights in respect of poetry, we might wish to recognize the possibility of those rights coming into conflict with the expressive and other rights and interests of third parties and society, as in the case of a literary critic wishing to use the poem to illustrate a point in an article critiquing it, or a library wishing to preserve and provide public access to the cultural products of its local community. Overall, and as we will see further in Chapter 3, while deontological arguments can help to establish a prima facie claim to legal protection in respect of certain subject matter, they offer limited assistance in defining the most appropriate form of legal protection itself. What they do offer, however, is an insight into the values protected by IP systems and their deeper normative foundations. These include several of the values that drove the emergence of copyright—such as individual (expressive and financial) autonomy, social and political participation, and freedom of expression—as well as certain others, such as privacy. As we will see in later chapters, each of these informs European copyright systems particularly. 1.2.2.3.2 Utilitarian Theories and Values Deontological theories are also the departure point for the second set of arguments for IP, epitomized by the title of the Statute of Anne: ‘An Act for the Encouragement of
Learning’. The implication of this title is that the justification for granting copyright and other forms of IP lies not in any appeal to morality or natural law rights per se, but rather in a policy commitment to encouraging certain behaviour, such as (most commonly) the production and distribution of intellectual products—including works, inventions, and signs of origin—by means of property grants. Such grants, it is said, benefit the public economically and socially. Economically, they resolve the market failure created by the intangibility of those products and, in the case of trade marks, encourage the use of signs to indicate the commercial origin of goods and services in the interests of market transparency. The result is more efficient and competitive markets in respect of intellectual products, and new forms of property (IP) that can be traded and otherwise deployed to generate wealth and finance activities. So too socially, property grants support a robust public domain of expressive and informational (including technical) subject matter, increasing the public’s exposure to the ideas and expressions essential for innovation, creativity, and cultural development. In particular, they create a false scarcity with respect to IP subject matter by excluding others from using them, and thereby enable their bene­ ficiaries to exploit those subject matter in the manner of tangible objects. Provided that individual creators and innovators believe that this possibility of commercial exploitation will result in a reasonable financial return, utilitarian theorists claim, they will be encouraged to bring new creations and innovations to market. Hence the idea of using property rights as a mechanism for encouraging individuals to produce and disseminate expressive and informational works of value to society. As with deontological arguments for IP, the premise of utilitarian theories is easily criticized. For example, the idea that authors, traders, and innovators have no deeper claim than that supported by statute to exclude third parties from the unauthorized use of their creations, signs, and innovations can seem counter-intuitive in an age in which such use is frequently described as ‘plagiarism’ and ‘piracy’. Equally contentious are the empirical claims of utilitarianism, and in particular its assumptions: (a) that the creation of IP subject matter is in all cases motivated by economic considerations rather than communicative, reputational, or truth-seeking ones; (b) that property rights are required (necessary) and able (effective) to cure the market failure that exists in respect of IP subject matter; and (c) that market-based systems of incentivizing creation and dissemination through the grant of property rights benefit the public more than they harm it. For example, many support the grant of IP rights as a means of encouraging people to create works or devise inventions and to make their works or inventions available to the public. However, even if we accept the social value of these acts of creation/invention and disclosure, it does not follow that the promise of property rights is necessary to encourage them. On the contrary, it is often said that in fast-moving (short shelf life) industries particularly, such as the textbook and computer industries, being the first to market with a new work or invention will in most cases create a sufficient window in which to exploit the work or invention before it is reproduced and distributed by third parties. If this is accepted, not only is there no need for IP rights to restrict public access to works and inventions within these industries, there is also no justification for them. In addition, even if we accept that there is a need for incentives in these and other industries, there remains the difficulty of defining what incentives are necessary, and when if ever the public interest in the longterm goals that they pursue should be recognized as outweighed by the claims of individuals in particular cases. So too in respect of trade mark law, while many would accept the value of encouraging people to affix signs of origin to their goods and services, it is not clear that the promise of property is necessary to encourage this. On the contrary, many would argue that granting property rights in respect of signs of origin merely encourages them to be treated in the manner of works and inventions—i.e. as intellectual products
having value in their own right, independent of their function in indicating origin—and supports their protection as such. On this view, rather than conferring a limited right to prevent unauthorized uses of a sign likely to confuse consumers as to the origin of goods or services, trade mark law should confer a right to prevent any unauthorized use of a sign likely to diminish its value as an asset and brand. Once again, then, while utilitarian arguments can help to establish a prima facie claim to legal protection, they offer limited assistance in defining the shape that that protection should take. Still, and as with deontological arguments, they point to some of the values that IP rights protect, while also making the theoretical foundations of those values transparent. These include such commercial values as market efficiency and fair competition, as well as the range of social and economic values promoted by access to expressive and informational subject matter, including social and democratic participation, freedom of expression, and technological innovation, all of which inform the European IP regime. 1.2.2.3.3 Pluralistic Theories As our earlier discussion of 18th century enactments reflects, deontological and utilitarian theories of IP have historically been aligned with civil and common law traditions respectively. In recent years, however, it has become common to downplay the differences between these traditions with a view to emphasizing both their nuances and similarities. This has coincided with a new emphasis among IP theorists on the comparative importance for the day-to-day operation of IP systems of values and corresponding mid-level principles in place of foundational, including deontological or utilitarian, theories.39 At the supranational level especially, focusing on principles (or normative guidelines) such as the need to protect individual autonomy and (following Article 17(2) CFR) the need to protect IP itself promotes harmonization by distracting attention from foundational questions such as ‘why should we protect intellectual property?’ to the question ‘how is the principle of intellectual property protection appropriately reconciled with other fundamental rights principles, such as freedom of expression and discrimination, in the present case?’40 In so doing, focusing on principles also suggests a certain division of labour between supranational and domestic institutions aimed at promoting the EU legal order’s objective of ‘creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity’ (Preamble TEU; Section 2.4.1.3). According to that division, the role of supranational institutions, including courts particularly, is to establish the fundamental rights and other general principles of relevance for IP, and the role of their domestic counterparts is to balance those rights and principles to achieve justice in individual cases. In addition to promoting institutional cooperation and legal harmonization, such a division of labour recognizes the legal and social diversity among different IP regimes and countries, and seeks to maintain and accommodate that diversity by eschewing a ‘one size fits all’ model of IP in favour of one capable of accommodating a plurality of philosophies. Put differently, it is consistent with the emphasis placed by European law on ‘respecting the diversity of the cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe as well as the national identities of the Member States’, and on ensuring that legal and political objectives are pursued in a manner sensitive to the ‘spiritual and moral heritage’ of 39 See, e.g., R.P. Merges, Justifying Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2011); also D.B. Resnik, ‘A Pluralistic Account of Intellectual Property’ (2003) 46 Journal of Business Ethics 319. 40 A good example is Case C–201/13 Deckmyn v Vandersteen EU:C:2014:2132 (Deckmyn), considered in Section 13.4.7.2.
European communities;41 an emphasis that gives pluralistic theories additional normative and explanatory value for the European IP regime.42 The question remains, what values and principles are and ought to be given priority in that regime? And related to this, what values and principles does the European experience of IP suggest should merit priority? Based on our previous discussion we might highlight as those ultimate and utilitarian values suggested by history to merit priority: individual (expressive and financial) autonomy; innovation; social and political participation; fair trade and consumer protection; and access to information and new technologies. Of immediate note regarding these is their connection to the values and objectives of the EU. For example, Article 2 TEU describes the EU as founded on the values of respect for freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, among others; Article 3 TEU describes its objectives to include the establishment of an internal market based on economic growth, a competitive social market economy, a high level of environmental protection and improvement, and the promotion of scientific and technological advance. These provisions are underpinned and extended by the list of CFR rights, which include, in addition to the protection of IP itself in Article 17(2): civil-political (first-generation) rights to liberty (Article 6), privacy (Article 7), personal data (Article 8), freedom of thought (Article 10), expression and information (Article 11);
socio-economic (second-generation) rights to education (Article 14), work (Article 15), and freedom to conduct a business (Article 16); and even
collective-developmental (third-generation) rights to freedom of the arts and sciences (Article 13), respect for cultural diversity (Article 22), and a high level of consumer protection (Article 38).
Further, the connection between these rights and the values of historical importance in IP—in combination with the explicit purpose of the CFR to support ‘an ever closer union among [the peoples of Europe] based on common values’ (Preamble), and its position in the hierarchy of European legal norms alongside the Treaties (on which see Section 2.4.1.2)—makes the CFR, in conjunction with Articles 2 and 3 TEU, the natural starting point for any European IP regime, especially one that takes its basic aim as being to balance justice and order in the light of European experience and the common values reflected therein.43 A final point to emerge from the connection between the values of historical importance in IP and those of the contemporary European legal order as reflected in the EU Treaties and CFR is the tension between them. Specifically, it is at first glance difficult to see how a commitment to protecting individual rights of liberty and equality can coexist with a commitment to protecting collective rights of fraternity, and so too in the context of IP, it is difficult to see how a law protecting the autonomy of individual creators with exclusionary rights can promote the freedom of the arts and sciences. The answer to this apparent conflict between the rights of individuals and societies lies in our earlier discussion of IP and competition.44 Put simply, while IP rights restrict the freedom of the
Preamble CFR; see also Preamble, Articles 2, 3, and 6 TEU. See further Section 2.4.1.2. J. Pila, ‘Pluralism, Principles and Proportionality in Intellectual Property’ (2014) 34 OJLS 181. 43 See n 5 and accompanying text. 44 See S.M. Twiss, ‘Moral Grounds and Plural Cultures: Interpreting Human Rights in the International Community’ (1998) 26 Journal of Religious Ethics 271, 274. 42
immediate generation, their limited scope and duration ensure, in theory at least, that they promote the freedom of future generations by encouraging creators to continue creating and disseminating their creations. In this way, the idea emerges of IP as promoting individual and collective rights and interests simultaneously, consistent with the idea of first-, second-, and third-generation human rights as interdependent rather than inconsistent.45 Again, these are ideas to which we return in Chapters 2 and 3.
1.2.3 Concluding Remarks: The Importance of IP History and Theory In an essay concerning the limits of legal logic, the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that: The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.46
In Novartis AG v Union of India (2013) 6 SCC 1, the Supreme Court of India alluded to this passage in the context of IP when it decided that in order to understand Indian patent law particularly, ‘it is essential to know the “why” and “how” of the law. Why the law is what it is and how it came to its present form’ (128). Many readers will require no persuasion to the view thus expressed that legal history and theory—the how and why of the law—promote a fuller understanding of the substantive rules of contemporary IP regimes. For others, however, it is worth pausing to consider why this is so. There are two main reasons: the first pedagogical and the second practical. The pedagogical reason is that historical and theoretical accounts of IP offer positions of critical distance from which to view contemporary rules, and in doing so support independent engagement with and reflection on them. For example, historical accounts enable us to observe the law in action, as part of the complex web of ideas and socio-economic relations that constitute particular legal and social communities, while theoretical accounts offer a range of analytical frameworks and reference points for understanding and assessing what we observe, including its contemporary significance. Consistent with this, IP theory offers a means of connecting substantive rules inter se into a unified and analytically coherent whole, and a vocabulary with which to talk about those rules beyond the formal vocabulary provided by the legislature and courts. In addition, IP history offers an important reminder that while different IP laws and the ideas that underpin them embody ‘the story of a nation’s development through many centuries’,47 and as such ought not to be hastily dismissed in pursuit of harmonization or other political objectives,48 they are neither inevitable nor deserving of normative priority merely on this (historical) basis or by reason of their temporal currency. While each of these points has validity for law in general, the contention surrounding the foundations of IP law specifically, including its 45 ibid 275–6. 46
O.W. Holmes, ‘Lecture I: Early Forms of Liability’ (Lowell Lecture, 23 November 1880). 48 See Lehmann (n 3) 527.
appropriate conception and scope, make them especially valid for us, consistent with the Supreme Court’s suggestion in the Novartis case. The contention surrounding the proper conception and scope of contemporary IP also underlines the validity of the second and more practical reason for engaging with its history and theory, which is that they directly inform IP law- and decision-making. For example, lawyers often deploy history and theory in formulating legal arguments,49 and courts often invoke history and theory to explain and justify decisions reached in individual cases.50 In addition, within European legal orders, established rules of systemic, purposive, and teleological interpretation—according to which the meaning of laws must be derived from their object and purpose, as well as from the legal and constitutional scheme of which they form a part 51—require courts to have regard to history and theory to the extent necessary, at least, to identify and understand the significance of the context, object, and purpose of different legislative provisions. In addition, and consistent with these interpretative obligations of European tribunals, European law- and policy-makers regularly appeal to history and theory in justification of different laws and policies, and all European institutions make decisions regarding the nature and importance of certain rights and interests when deciding IP cases that can only be fully understood and assessed with reference to their historical and normative foundations.52 In addition, the explicit concern of European legal orders to respect the traditions and spiritual and moral heritage of their Member States53 —also expressed in their commitment to constitutional pluralism and (related) recognition that, in the words of Harold Berman, ‘the universal characteristics of legal morality and legal politics are manifested in quite different ways in different countries with different legal histories’54 —gives them a stronger normative and historical orientation than domestic legal orders possess.55 And given this especially, one might validly describe the process of European law- and policy-making as one of ‘balancing . . . morality and politics in the light of history’ and ‘of justice and order in the light of experience,’56 underlining again the importance of understanding the why and how of IP. 49 In IP see, e.g., G. Finniss (Director of the French National Institute of Industrial Property and architect of the European industrial property system), ‘The Theory of “Unity of Art” and the Protection of Designs and Models in French Law’ (1964) 66 Journal of the Patent Office Society 615. 50 Two recent examples from the Supreme Court of the UK are Lucasfilm Ltd v Ainsworth [2011] UKSC 39 and Human Genome Sciences Inc. v Eli Lilly [2011] UKSC 51. 51 On the interpretative approach of the Court of Justice see, from a vast literature, K. Lenaerts (Vice-President of the Court of Justice of the European Union) and J.A. Gutiérrez-Fons (Legal Secretary at the Cabinet of the Vice-President), ‘To Say What the Law of the EU Is: Methods of Interpretation and the European Court of Justice’ (2014) 20 Columbia Journal of European Law 3. A classic EU authority remains Case C–283/81 Srl CILFIT and Lanificio di Gavardo SpA v Ministry of Health [1982] ECR 3415. On the interpretative approach of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO see further G2/12 and G2/13 (Essentially Biological Processes) (2015) EPOR 28 (supporting a similar systemic, purposive, and teleological approach with respect to the European Patent Convention (EPC)). 52 Examples in the copyright and patents fields include Deckmyn, considered in Section 13.4.8, and Case C–34/10 Brüstle v Greenpeace eV [2011] ECR I-9821, considered in Sections 3.9 and 6.3.2. 53 For the EU see n 5; for the EPC see G3/08 (PRESIDENT’S REFERENCE/Computer Program Exclusion) (2009) EPOR 9. 54 H.J. Berman, ‘The Origins of Historical Jurisprudence: Coke, Selden, Hale’ (1994) 103 Yale Law Journal 1651, 1732. 55 See M.P. Maduro (Advocate General of the European Court of Justice), ‘Interpreting European Law: Judicial Adjudication in a Context of Constitutional Pluralism’ (2007) 1 European Journal of Legal Studies 1, 3. 56 n 42.
What, How, and Why of International IP L aw
1.3 The What, How, and Why of International Intellectual Property Law 1.3.1 Preliminary Remarks Our focus to here has been on the emergence and development of IP law in European states. As we have seen, having some awareness of domestic IP traditions within those states is important, among other reasons because of the emphasis placed by the EU and other European legal communities on developing legal rules in a way that takes account of the traditions of Member States and the common values which those traditions express. Indeed, it is precisely because of this emphasis that the aims and objectives of the European IP legal field can be expected to mirror those of European states historically. Nonetheless, every supranational community has its own policy agendas and reasons for being separate from those of its member states, and these will inevitably influence its perspectives on and approaches to IP. Hence the need to consider European IP law with reference not only to the general law of IP as developed by (European) nation states, but also to the international IP legal field.
1.3.2 What is International Intellectual Property Law? International IP law may be defined as the accumulated body of legislation, legal acts, and judicial decisions promulgated by the institutions of established international communities, and creating legal obligations with respect to the recognition and protection of the IP rights of those countries’ citizens. Thus defined it includes a wide range of instruments focused on or relevant to IP, including several created under the aegis of the United Nations (UN), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and World Trade Organization (WTO) respectively. It also includes all IP laws promulgated or recognized by the EU and other European legal communities, and in particular, the collection of primary and secondary EU laws that create legal obligations with respect to the IP rights of the citizens of the 28 EU Member States, including all international agreements to which the EU is a signatory (see Article 216(2) Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Section 2.4.2.4);
the EPC and associated decisions of the European Patent Office, which create legal obligations with respect to the IP rights of the citizens of the 38 EPC Contracting States;
the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement, including: (a) Protocol 28 on intellectual property, which requires Contracting Parties to adhere to a range of international IP conventions (Article 5), namely, the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention, the Rome Convention, the Madrid Agreement, the Nice Agreement, the Budapest Treaty, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty; and (b) Annex XVII, which incorporates certain EU legislative measures into EEA law (see Article 65(2) EEA Agreement), thereby extending their effect to EEA territory and creating further legal obligations with respect to the IP rights of the citizens of the 31 EEA States; and
the European Convention on Human Rights and associated decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, which create legal obligations with respect to the IP rights of the citizens of the 47 Council of Europe Member States.
European Union (28 Member States) and European Economic Area (31 States)
Council of Europe (47 Member States)
Unitary (EU) Patent community (13 + EU Member States)
European Patent Convention community (38 Contracting States)
Figure 1.5 European IP communities
When the recently concluded unitary (EU) patent system is established, international IP law will also include the decisions of the Unified Patent Court, which will create legal obligations with respect to the IP rights of the citizens of the 13 or more EU Member States participating in the system. Thus, and as shown in Figure 1.5, there are several European and non-European international communities involved in the regulation of IP rights, each with its own membership, institutions, and reasons for being. As we will see in later chapters, understanding the relationship between these communities and their IP laws and policies is a central challenge presented by this field.
1.3.3 The How and Why of International Intellectual Property Law 1.3.3.1 International IP Law as a Coordinated Response to the Problems Created by Domestic IP Territoriality Another challenge is to understand how the variety of European and other international IP laws operate. Many operate by establishing legal standards for their member states to implement within their own territories, rather than by regulating the behaviour of those states’ citizens per se. Such laws are accordingly addressed to states rather than to individuals, and tend to be expressed at a higher level of abstraction than domestic IP laws, as well as being limited in their field of coverage. However, there are exceptions to this within the EU particularly, many of whose IP laws are addressed to individuals and penetrate directly into the domestic orders of EU Member States, making them more akin to the laws of a country than the laws of an international community. Related to this is the unique concern of European and other international legal systems with replacing or supplementing the domestic laws of a given region with supranational laws and policies. In the IP context, a key reason for this concern to unify or harmonize domestic systems has been the desire to reduce or abolish their territorial restrictions in
order to support peace and prosperity throughout the relevant region. In this important respect, European and other supranational initiatives differ from domestic initiatives, being a coordinated response to the problems caused by domestic IP territoriality.
1.3.3.2 The Nature, Foundations, and Impact of Domestic IP Territoriality 1.3.3.2.1 IP Territoriality Historically, IP territoriality has denoted three things. The first is the conferral of IP rights under the national laws of individual states. The second is the restriction of the legal effects of those rights to the territory of their conferring state. And the third is the enforcement of IP rights by the courts of the conferring state applying domestic law. In addition, IP territoriality has tended to support definitions of IP rights themselves aimed at protecting the interests of the protecting state and its citizens, including at the expense of foreigners. For example, in the 18th century a citizen of Italy could only prevent a third party in Denmark from making and publishing copies of her novel if she was able to establish a sufficient connection to Danish territory to claim the protections of its domestic copyright laws and access the Danish courts to secure those laws’ enforcement. She would have struggled to meet the first of these hurdles, particularly if the third party was the first person to publish the novel in Denmark, in which case he and not the novel’s author would have been the beneficiary of its copyright under Danish law. 1.3.3.2.2 The Foundations of IP Territoriality The territorial restrictions on IP rights can be attributed to the origin of those rights in privileges conferred on individuals by the Crown or other state authority as a means of rewarding and encouraging certain conduct of benefit to the state. When these privileges later took the form of legal entitlements, they were similarly confined to the territory over which the state’s sovereign powers extended, and similarly drafted by and to benefit the conferring state. For example, and as we saw in Section 1.2, the first general patent statute of Venice from 1474 was expressed as having the purpose of encouraging men to ‘apply their genius [to] discover, and . . . build devices of great utility and benefit to our Commonwealth’, and to that end promised ‘every person who shall build any new and ingenious device in this City, not previously made in this Commonwealth’ a ten-year monopoly over its manufacture in ‘our territories and towns’, enforceable before any local magistrate. So too, as seen in Section 1.2.2.2.1, the first general copyright statute from 1710 was entitled ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’, and promised any author who published a book in Britain, and registered and deposited it, a renewable 14-year right to prevent others from importing, printing and exploiting it, enforceable before the local courts. As these earliest IP statutes underline, territoriality supports the sovereignty of states by recognizing their complete and exclusive authority with respect to the governance of their territory. For example, the Venetian Senate had no authority to grant monopolies that would restrict life outside Venice, and the English Government had no authority to restrict the freedom of people to copy manuscripts beyond British shores. In addition, the recognition of state sovereignty had especial importance in IP because of the different understandings of and attitudes to IP rights that existed at different times and in different countries. Hence, IP rights have been alternatively regarded as privileges granted by the government in pursuit of certain social and economic objectives, ends in themselves granted in recognition of the moral or natural property rights of their beneficiaries, and unjustifiable restraints on trade and public freedoms. Given this diversity of views, IP territoriality has been an essential means by which individual countries have been able to shape their laws to reflect their own values and interests.
Economic self-interest has always been a central determinant of domestic IP laws and policies. For countries with established creative and scientific industries and a strong export market, IP rights have tended to be viewed as a means of protecting the products of domestic manufacture when traded internationally. For countries dependent on exports from abroad to acquire their cultural and scientific products, they have tended to represent a restriction on access and a cause of inflated pricing. For example, when Switzerland introduced a patent law in the late 19th century, it restricted the law’s operation to the mechanical field so as only to protect those goods in which Switzerland had an established manufacturing and export industry. By contrast, other fields in which Switzerland had no established industry and thus depended on imports from abroad—such as the chemical field—were left unprotected by patents, enabling continued free public access to chemical inventions patented abroad. Such state-supported policies of international ‘piracy’ in the public interest were common in 19th century Europe. Another example is provided by the French patent law of 1791, which prohibited the holding of French patents alongside patents from other countries in respect of the same invention, while also treating as inventors any person who introduced into France an invention from abroad, whether or not it was protected by a foreign patent. And finally, there is the example of the English Statute of Anne, the efforts of which to encourage the importation and circulation of foreign-language works led to its express exclusion from copyright protection of ‘the Importation, Vending, or Selling of any Books in Greek, Latin, or any other Foreign Language Printed beyond the Seas.’ Whatever their motivation, by the end of the 19th century most European states had decided that IP rights ought to be recognized and protected, and that some form of international cooperation in securing such recognition and protection was necessary. 1.3.3.2.3 The Problems Created by IP Territoriality In principle, IP territoriality increases the chance of IP rights being recognized and protected somewhere in the world; the non-recognition or non-enforcement of IP rights in one territory not affecting their recognition and enforcement in other territories. Overall, however, it creates more problems for individuals than benefits. From the perspective of IP rights owners, those problems arise in any situation in which IP subject matter passes (with or without the rights owner’s permission) beyond the territorial boundaries of the rights-granting state. In addition, over the past 70 years, expanding economic markets combined with developing digital and other technologies have made the passage of IP subject matter across national borders commonplace. Hence the challenge for states to address the problems created by IP territoriality while preserving their freedom to define their IP laws and policies in the way that best reflects their local values and interests. Meeting this challenge has been a central aim of international initiatives since the 19th century.
1.3.3.3 The Emergence of International IP Systems in Response to IP Territoriality 1.3.3.3.1 Mutual Recognition and Extra-Territoriality: 19th Century Bilateral Agreements At the international level, states have developed several strategies to help to address the problems created by IP domestic territoriality. Among the earliest were the strategies of extra-territoriality and mutual recognition, which involved: (a) declaring the state’s domestic laws to have extra-territorial effect for the benefit of the citizens of other states; and (b) agreeing to recognize and enforce the IP laws or procedures of another state, subject to a requirement of formal or material reciprocity.
Mutual recognition of domestic IP laws was the basis for the bilateral IP agreements that emerged in the 19th century. These had been championed by different countries as a means of securing protection for their own citizens abroad, and by the 1890s formed an extensive and complex network of legal IP arrangements throughout Europe, including 15 with France as a party, nine with Belgium, and eight with each of Spain and Italy. While many of the agreements contained similar provisions, their separate negotiation by different pairs of states with varied IP traditions and economic interests ensured that they contained many differences, including with respect to their coverage. For most states, concerned primarily with protecting their citizens’ interests (rather than the interests of individuals per se), the benefits of each bilateral agreement needed to be carefully weighed against its detriments. In the 1850s, France boosted the political currency of bilateral IP agreements by unilaterally extending the protection of its domestic copyright laws to cover the works of foreigners, consistent with the principle of extra-territoriality. Motivated in part by its view of copyright as a natural right of individual authors, the French decree encouraged reciprocal acts of generosity by other states and helped to secure protection for the works of French and other nationals overseas. As mechanisms for overcoming the practical effects of IP territoriality, bilateral agreements were important but ultimately insufficient in the manner of all contractual solutions. The reason was the restriction of their terms to the two contracting states, and their consequential failure to deal with the reality of interstate trade involving other countries. This was a particular difficulty in a geographical area as small as Europe, as the following excerpt from a debate in the English House of Commons from 1838 illustrates. Mr. Goulburn confessed, that he felt considerable difficulty as to the mode in which the objects of the bill [proposing a bilateral copyright agreement between France and England] were to be carried out; and one of the points which struck him the most forcibly was the question whether, in the event of England binding itself by means of a convention with France, that country was to be bound not to receive books from Belgium, the copyrights of which belonged to England, but which had been improperly printed elsewhere, and also whether England was to bind itself to receive no French books, unless from France itself. That was one of the greatest difficulties which suggested itself to his mind, for those who, for the benefit of their own trade, pirated the works of others, would take care to mark the work which they published with the name of the country from which it originally proceeded, so that the whole work would bear the strongest resemblance to the originals and the greatest difficulty would be found in distinguishing the spurious from the genuine editions.57
1.3.3.3.2 The IP Conventions of the 19th and 20th Centuries Thus, even in the 19th century the reality of interstate trade was recognized as requiring a more comprehensive form of international cooperation in IP than a network of bilateral agreements. The obvious solution lay in a convention to establish general standards of legal protection within a wider community of states. In the 1880s two such conventions were concluded. The first was the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property 1883, which governed ‘patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, trade names, indications of source or appellations of origin, and the repression of unfair competition’ (Article 1(2)), i.e. the collection of IP rights referred to as ‘industrial property’. And the second was the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and 57
House of Commons Debates, 20 March 1838 vol. 41 cc. 1095–108.
Industrial Property (Paris)
Literary and Artistic Property (Berne)
• patents • trade marks • trade secrets • designs • unfair competition • geographical indications
• authors’ rights
Figure 1.6 The Paris and Berne IP taxonomy
Artistic Property 1886, which governed copyright and related rights. Together these are known as the Great Conventions of the 19th century, and account for the basic distinction drawn in European IP law between industrial property rights on the one hand and copyright and related rights on the other, reflected in Figure 1.6.
Minimum standards of protection and non-discriminatory treatment: the Great (Paris and Berne) Conventions of the 19th century The Paris and Berne Conventions are as important today as they were in the 19th century. With more than 160 members each, they remain foundational IP instruments throughout the world, and are the bases of all European IP laws and policies. In addition, their continued foundational importance for Europe is assured by at least two things. The first is the obligation of the EU and EEA States under TRIPS, the WCT and Protocol 28 EEA Agreement to comply with the substantive provisions of each. And the second is the number of continental states particularly that recognize those provisions as capable of applying directly, without the need for implementing measures, provided only that they are sufficiently clear, precise, and unconditional to satisfy domestic requirements for direct effect.58 Each of the Paris and Berne Conventions establishes a Union of states bound by their commitment to its principles. Hence the opening provision of the Paris Convention that ‘[t]‌he countries to which this Convention applies constitute a Union for the protection of industrial property’ (Article 1(1)), and the opening provision of the Berne Convention that ‘[t]he countries to which this Convention applies constitute a Union for the protection of the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works’ (Article 1). Two principles are central to each, and hence to the Unions they create. The first is the principle of national (non-discriminatory) treatment, which requires each Union state to accord the citizens of other Union states the same treatment under its national laws as it accords its own citizens. The result is a requirement for national treatment in a formal, rather than a material, sense: the protection offered by state A to the citizens of other Union states need not match the protection extended by those other states to the citizens of state A, but is 58 See, e.g., BGHZ 141, 13, discussed in J. Bornkamm, ‘The German Supreme Court: An Actor in the Global Conversation of High Courts’ (2004) 39 Texas International Law Journal 415, 419.
rather conditional upon an agreement by those other states to extend the protections of their own laws to the citizens of state A. Hence the importance of the Conventions’ second foundational principle—the principle of minimum standards of IP protection—which ensures a baseline for the recognition and protection of IP rights that is not assured by the requirement of national treatment itself. Under the Conventions’ minimum standards guarantee, each Union state must recognize certain minimum standards of IP protection domestically, including those referred to in Figure 1.7, but is otherwise free to formulate its own IP laws and policies. Through these two principles of national treatment and minimum standards of protection, the Conventions affirm the domestic territoriality of IP rights while also addressing some of its negative effects through the creation of a framework for the rights’ international recognition and protection. Since the 19th century, the Paris and Berne Conventions have been revised and amended on several occasions, most recently in 1979. They have also been supplemented by several additional conventions aimed at extending the reach of the international framework they establish to take account of economic and technological developments, including by raising the minimum standards of protection required of states to reflect the increased production capacities and expanded distribution chains enabled by globalizing markets and digital technology. Those additional conventions have been concluded under the aegis of three main international institutions: the WIPO, the WTO, and the UN. The WIPO conventions include the Patent Law Treaty 2000 for patents, the Rome Convention 1961, Copyright Treaty 1996, and Performances and Phonograms Treaty 1996 for copyright, and the Madrid Agreement 1891 and Trademark Law Treaty 1994 for trade marks. The WTO and UN Conventions include the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement 1994, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of 2001, and the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992. Of these additional international conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and TRIPS Agreement may be said to have especial importance for IP in general. The UDHR follows the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in constitutionalizing the rights of property and IP internationally. To that end Article 27(2) UDHR recognizes the right of everyone ‘to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic product of which he is the author’, and Article 17 recognizes the right of individuals ‘to own property’ and not to be ‘arbitrarily deprived’ of it. In the other direction, Article 27(1) UDHR recognizes ‘the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits,’ reinforcing the tension apparent throughout history between the individual and collective aspects of IP.59
Most favoured nation provisions: the TRIPS Agreement 1994 Of a rather different hue is the TRIPS Agreement.60 According to conventional accounts of TRIPS, its creation was driven by the concern of the United States, supported by the European Commission, Japan, and the pharmaceutical and film industries, to bring IP rights within the framework of the WTO due to the growing manufacturing capa­ city of developing countries, and the increased reliance of developed countries on their comparative advantage in knowledge-based industries in order to maintain their global 59
See Drahos (n 14) 358.
But see Article 7 TRIPS Agreement.
Minimum Standards Required by the Paris/Berne Conventions
Trade marks: Arts 6ter, 6sexies, and 7bis Paris. Literary and artistic property: Arts 2 and 2bis Berne.
Industrial property: Arts 4, 5D, and 5bis Paris (formal). Patents: Art. 4quater Paris (substantive). Trade marks: Arts 6(2) and 6quinquies Paris (formal); Art. 7 Paris (substantive). Trade names: Art. 8 Paris. Literary and artistic property: Art. 5 Berne (formal); Art. 2 Berne (substantive).
Industrial property: Art. 10ter Paris. Patents: Arts 4bis, 4ter, 5A, and 5quarter Paris. Trade marks: Art. 6 Paris. Industrial designs: Art. 5B Paris. Literary and artistic property: Arts 6bis, 8, 9, 11, 11bis, 11ter, 12, 14, and 14ter Berne.
Patents: Art. 5ter Paris. Trade marks: Art. 6bis Paris. Literary and artistic property: Arts 9(2), 10, and 10bis Berne.
Literary and artistic property: Art. 7 Berne.
Industrial property: Art. 2 Paris. Literary and artistic property: Arts 3, 4 and 14bis Berne.
Patents and utility models: Art. 5A Paris. Trade marks: Art. 6quarter Paris. Literary and artistic property: Arts 6bis, 14ter, 11bis(2), 13(1), and 14(3) Berne.
Trade marks and trade names: Art. 9 Paris. Literary and artistic property: Art. 16 Berne.
Figure 1.7 Key minimum standards required by the Paris and Berne Conventions
economic position and strength. By concluding the Agreement, developed countries and regions made the recognition and protection of IP rights a precondition for participation in the global market, thereby ensuring protection for their domestic IP-related assets and industries. The overall significance of the TRIPS Agreement from a European perspective may be summarized as follows. First, it builds on and supplements the Great Conventions to establish an international framework for the recognition and protection of IP rights in a vastly different economic and technological context from that of the 19th century. To that end it requires its member states to maintain certain minimum standards of IP protection for their own nationals and for the nationals of all other member states (Article 1(1)), including the protection required by Articles 1 to 12 and 19 Paris Convention (Article 2(1)) and Articles 1 to 21 Berne Convention (except Article 6bis concerning authors’ moral rights) (Article 9(1)), as well as a range of other provisions drawn from domestic IP systems of the mid-20th century. In addition, it reproduces the national treatment provisions of the Great Conventions, and extends them to the realm of interstate relations by
means of a ‘most favoured nation’ provision (Articles 3 and 4). According to the requirements of that provision, any state that confers benefits on the nationals of another state must extend the same benefits immediately and unconditionally to the nationals of all other member states, even if the treatment is more favourable than that which the conferring state accords to its own nationals. Hence, in addressing the problems of IP territory, the TRIPS Agreement deploys the same ‘minimum standards’ and ‘national treatment’ requirements as the Paris and Berne Conventions, supplemented by a new ‘most favoured nation’ provision. Third, the TRIPS Agreement is subject to the WTO dispute resolution mechanism, creating an international forum for resolving disputes between countries regarding the meaning of its IP provisions. And finally, and as we will see in Section 2.4.2.4.2, as an international agreement signed by the EU and falling within its sphere of exclusive competence, the TRIPS Agreement generates legal effects within the EU legal order and establishes a general jurisdiction for the Court of Justice with respect to its provisions. 1.3.3.3.3 Facilitating Parallel IP Protection: International Arrangements for the Administration of IP Rights In addition to harmonizing substantive IP law, there has been a long-standing effort to make it easier and cheaper for people to acquire and enforce IP rights outside the territories of the states of which they are citizens. The Berne Convention was significant in this regard because of its requirement that states grant copyright protection without the registration or other formalities required for industrial property (Article 5(2)), and so too for each of the Madrid Agreement 1891 and Patent Cooperation Treaty 1970, which created an international system of trade mark registration and patent application respectively to enable people to obtain bundles of national industrial property rights via a single administrative regime. Also, there is the EPC, referred to earlier, which created a system for obtaining bundles of national patents from any number of its (currently 38) EU and non-EU Contracting States. In these international administrative initiatives we see a further strategy that has been developed by groups of states to reduce the negative effects of IP territoriality. That strategy involves establishing supranational procedural and other mechanisms to make it easier for people to satisfy the conditions imposed by the IP laws of different countries and thereby acquire parallel IP protection in them. One of the earliest of these initiatives in Europe was the creation by the Benelux countries and France of the International Patent Institute (IIB) in The Hague in 1947 to centralize aspects of the patent-granting procedure for the benefit of people seeking patent protection in those countries.61 Moving from the acquisition to the enforcement of IP rights brings us to a further range of international initiatives aimed at establishing common rules of jurisdiction and applicable law to facilitate the resolution of cross-border disputes. The earliest of these was the 1968 Brussels Convention, which established the basic principle that jurisdiction to hear a matter vests with the court of the state in which the defendant to the matter is domiciled, regardless of where the claimant is domiciled, which state granted the right, and where the infringing act took place (Article 2), while also recognizing exceptions of importance for IP. According to one of those exceptions, matters involving a tort (of which the infringement of IP rights is an example) could be brought before the courts of the state in which the harmful act occurred (Article 5(3)). According to another, ‘proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of patents, trade marks, designs, or other similar rights required to be deposited or registered’ could only be brought in the state 61
Following its creation in the 1970s, the European Patent Office subsumed the IIB.
in which the deposit or registration had been applied for, taken place, or deemed to have taken place under the terms of an international convention (Article 16). These and other provisions of the Brussels Convention were aimed at supporting the enforcement of IP rights granted by different states throughout the world, and have since been reproduced and supplemented in EU legislation (see Chapter 25). Each of these international mechanisms of administrative and judicial cooperation has been extremely successful, with the result that it is now common for individuals to hold several patents or other registrable IP rights in respect of the same invention or other subject matter from several states and to commence proceedings involving those rights in a range of domestic courts. This has also led to other legal strategies aimed at extending the benefits of parallel protection beyond IP rights owners themselves to the general public. The most important of these strategies has been the principle of exhaustion, which ensures that once a book, machine, or other good protected by IP is placed on the market with the IP rights owner’s consent, the effect of the IP in respect of it is exhausted for all states in which it is protected. In this way, the principle of exhaustion prevents an IP rights owner from relying on her parallel protection in different states to restrict the movement of goods between them, and thereby limits the potential for territorially limited IP rights to be used to partition and isolate markets. Importantly, however, exhaustion is a principle of national or European law, and not of international law. Thus, to decide whether a particular IP right in respect of a product is exhausted on first sale of the product, it is necessary to have regard to the domestic or European laws governing the relevant species of right. Once again, this is a matter to which we return in later chapters, including Section 2.4.2.1.3.
1.3.3.4 Conclusions Each of the international responses described earlier to the problems created by domestic IP territoriality has been of enormous legal and economic significance, including for European states. However, none comes close in its aims or effects to the EU’s response of choice. From the earliest days of European integration, that response has been to seek to redefine the territory for which IP rights are granted and within which they take effect. Thus, instead of domestic IP rights granted by Belgium or Italy, the aim has been to create European IP rights to take effect throughout European territory and be enforceable by European courts, in the same manner as they would previously have taken effect throughout Belgium or Italy and been enforceable by Belgian or Italian courts. As we will see in the coming chapters, this EU solution of choice to domestic IP territoriality is consistent with wider EU social and economic policies, including the creation of an EU single market, and has been implemented widely with respect to industrial property rights, as well as being recently proposed for copyright as well.
1.4 Conclusions The idea of IP can be traced to the ancient use of signs to distinguish the ownership and origin of goods; and in legal thought particularly, to the Roman law principle of accessio, according to which a person who painted a picture on a canvas thereby acquired ownership of the canvas. The first reported IP case was heard in Ireland in the 6th century, and involved a finding that literary copies of a manuscript belonged to the owner of the manuscript. And finally, the first general IP statute was enacted in Venice in 1474, and promised exclusive manufacturing rights to any person who built a new and useful device within the state. It is from such social and legal roots as these that the European IP system
is derived, and in the light of their development and reflected themes, that that system is best approached. In the case of copyright, these themes include: (a) support for an individuated conception of authorship, premised on a view of authors as having a personal connection with and responsibility for the things that they create; (b) recognition of intellectual products as objects of economic and social value capable of supporting property rights; and (c) a commitment among states to using exclusionary rights as mechanisms for balancing the claims of authors and the producers and publishers of their works with the freedom of third parties to express and access ideas and information and exploit fully the capacities of new technologies. In the case of industrial property, they include: (a) a belief that inventors at least deserve property protection by reason of their intellectual endeavours and/or capacities; and (b) a commitment among states to using exclusionary rights as mechanisms for regulating trade and technology, and promoting innovation and fair competition, to the benefit of industry, consumers, and the general public. It is only by identifying these themes in historical context that one can fully understand the prior experience of European states in the light of which contemporary law- and decisionmaking is undertaken, as well as the values that shaped the emergence and early development of their IP systems and that continue to inform European IP law today. As we have seen, central among these values are individual (expressive and financial) autonomy, social and political participation, trade and competition, freedom of expression, industrial and commercial innovation, consumer protection, and access to new technologies. As well as being a product of the domestic IP laws of individual European states, European IP law is part of an international network of IP laws that differ from the general IP laws of individual countries in three related aspects. First, unlike domestic IP laws, many international laws operate by establishing legal standards for states to implement within their own territories rather than by regulating the behaviour of those states’ citizens per se. Second, the need for international legal communities to accommodate the diverse values and legal traditions of their member states makes their IP laws and policies less likely to reflect a single model or justificatory theory of IP than those of individual countries. And third, a central aim of international European IP communities is to supplement or substitute domestic laws and policies with European laws and policies in pursuit of European objectives, including some that stand in tension with domestic interests, such as the abolition of territorial restrictions on the operation of IP regimes. Historically, all IP rights have been territorial in nature, in the sense of having been conferred by national law, confined in effect to the territory of the conferring state, and enforceable by a court with jurisdiction in respect of the laws of that state. The empirical explanation for this lies in the origins of IP rights in royal grants of privilege, and in the limits of domestic administrative and legislative authority. Normatively, its explanation lies in the support which domestic IP territoriality affords to state sovereignty, and the view of the state as the most appropriate forum for determining IP law and policy. Today, territoriality remains a mainstay of IP systems, and a foundational aspect of European IP law. Its effects have however been mitigated by various means. These include agreements to recognize and enforce the IP laws or procedures of another state, subject to a reciprocal recognition agreement by it. Second, they also include international commitments to recognizing minimum standards of IP protection and to ensuring that the citizens of states are treated equally with respect to IP. Third, they include the creation of administrative arrangements to facilitate the acquisition of IP rights in different states simultaneously, and the formulation of the principle of exhaustion to facilitate the movement of IP-protected goods between countries. And fourth and finally, they include the introduction of unitary IP rights, which are also territorial in nature, but which are conferred by a regional authority, confined in effect of the territory of that region, and enforceable by a
court with jurisdiction in respect of its laws. As we will see in later chapters, each of these four means of addressing the problems created by domestic IP territoriality is a mainstay of the current European IP field and system.
Further Reading Cornish, W.R., ‘The International Relations of Intellectual Property’ (1993) 52 Cambridge Law Journal 46 Drexl, J., Ruse-Khan, H.G., and Nadde-Phlix, S. (eds), EU Bilateral Trade Agreements and Intellectual Property: For Better or Worse? (Springer, 2014) Ginsburg, J.C., ‘Proto-Property in Literary and Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges’ (August 2015) Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-478, http:// ssrn.com/abstract=2650152 Ginsburg, J.C., ‘Tale of Two Copyrights: Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America’ (1990) 64 Tulane Law Review 1007 Hesse, C., ‘The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C.–A.D. 2000: An Idea in the Balance’ (2002) 131 Daedalus 26 Ladas, S.P., The International Protection of Industrial Property (Harvard University Press, 1930) Machlup, I.F. and Penrose, E., ‘The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century’ (1950) 10 Journal of Economic History 1 Netanel, N.W. (ed.), The Development Agenda: Global Intellectual Property and Developing Countries (OUP, 2009) Prager, F.D., ‘A History of Intellectual Property From 1545 to 1787’ (1944) 26 Journal of the Patent Office Society 711 Ricketson, S. and Ginsburg, J.C., International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond (2nd edn, OUP, 2005) Schechter, F.I., The Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to Trade-Marks (Columbia University Press, 1925) Teilmann-Lock, S., The Object of Copyright: A Conceptual History of Originals and Copies in Literature, Art and Design (Routledge, 2015)
Report "European Intellectual Property Law"