Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Brennan on Compulsory Licensing of IP

David J. Brennan, Swinburne Law School, has posted The First Compulsory Licensing of Patents and Copyright, which is forthcoming in Legal History 17 (2017): 1-45:
This article explains how compulsory licensing for intellectual property originated in British law in the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century for both patents and copyright. It is a history that is intricate, straddling the two regimes that comprise the main pillars of intellectual property, and requires consideration of contemporaneous developments occurring in the USA, North American colonies and Continental Europe. Through its exposition and analysis of the first five distinct compulsory licensing regimes, some concluding observations are made about the triggers for the first compulsory licences and the conditions that might help predict the desirability of compulsory licensing as a matter of modern public policy in any given setting.