From Babylon To The Silicon Valley

From Babylon to the Silicon Valley—The Origins and Evolution of Intellectual Property A Sourcebook Nuno Pires de Carvalho At its core, intellectual property today is the same as it was six thousand years ago: an instrument for the assertion of the identities of merchants and manufacturers in their struggle to lure customers with honesty and fairness. It arises spontaneously whenever and wherever entrepreneurs carry out their professions in an environment of competition. This masterful book, the first of its kind, presents more than two hundred sources going back to ancient Egypt, sharply detailing the evolution of intellectual property right up to its current prominence in global trade and international law. Highlighting important moments in the evolution of the intellectual property, the author—one of the world’s best known authorities in the field—assembles his chosen sources in a way that sheds definitive light on such aspects as the following: early origins in the appropriation of differentiating assets by merchants and manufacturers; evolution of trademark law up to the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement; evolution of patent law, demonstrating in detail how English and U.S. courts moulded its modern interpretation; differentiation of industrial designs; the comparatively modern development of trade secrets law; origins and evolution of international protection through treaties and free trade agreements; and the prodigious expansion of intellectual property law in the past few decades to previously unprotected areas of business and professional activity. The sources—many translated into English for the first time—are preceded when appropriate by brief notes explaining their context and relevance. The book closes with a chapter on contemporary debates, such as new areas of protection and new social controversies. As a compilation of sources that would be otherwise unavailable to most readers, this factual and impartial account of why and how intellectual property has emerged and evolved is a treasure trove for all those interested in how the imperatives of civilization have designed and continue to design the scope and the limits of intellectual property. The book will be warmly welcomed by practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of their working tools, as well as by academics, government officials, and relevant international organizations around the world.

From Babylon to the Silicon Valley--The Origins and Evolution of Intellectual Property A Sourcebook Nuno Pires de Carvalho At its core, intellectual property today is the same as it was six thousand years ago: an instrument for the assertion of the identities of merchants and manufacturers in their struggle to lure customers with honesty and fairness. It arises spontaneously whenever and wherever entrepreneurs carry out their professions in an environment of competition. This masterful book, the first of its kind, presents more than two hundred sources going back to ancient Egypt, sharply detailing the evolution of intellectual property right up to its current prominence in global trade and international law. Highlighting important moments in the evolution of the intellectual property, the author--one of the world's best known authorities in the field--assembles his chosen sources in a way that sheds definitive light on such aspects as the following: early origins in the appropriation of differentiating assets by merchants and manufacturers; evolution of trademark law up to the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement; evolution of patent law, demonstrating in detail how English and U.S. courts moulded its modern interpretation; differentiation of industrial designs; the comparatively modern development of trade secrets law; origins and evolution of international protection through treaties and free trade agreements; and the prodigious expansion of intellectual property law in the past few decades to previously unprotected areas of business and professional activity. The sources--many translated into English for the first time--are preceded when appropriate by brief notes explaining their context and relevance. The book closes with a chapter on contemporary debates, such as new areas of protection and new social controversies. As a compilation of sources that would be otherwise unavailable to most readers, this factual and impartial account of why and how intellectual property has emerged and evolved is a treasure trove for all those interested in how the imperatives of civilization have designed and continue to design the scope and the limits of intellectual property. The book will be warmly welcomed by practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of their working tools, as well as by academics, government officials, and relevant international organizations around the world.

Rampant global counterfeiting has led the fashion industry to seek ever greater enforcement of its intellectual property (IP) rights. Yet, as this hugely informative book shows, this is not new. Fashion designers and entrepreneurs, as well as manufacturers and tradespeople in the broader textiles industry from which fashion springs, have always struggled to convert existing IP rules to an industry that was—and is—configured by the pressure of intrinsically fleeting consumer tastes and trends. The distinguished author, adding to the series of major works that have made him a leading authority on IP law, triumphantly reveals in great detail how society has constructed IP in association with textiles so as to accommodate it to the particular characteristics of fashion that emerged in the last century. More than two hundred sources, many of them for the first time available in English, illustrated with fifty figures, allow the reader to directly encounter those who have made and continue to make the IP of textiles and fashion. The underlying raisons d’être of such aspects as the following become brilliantly clear: how fashion designers protect their creations against the spread of knock-offs; how fashion entrepreneurs appropriate prestige and reputation; how an iconic design becomes a brand or acquires secondary meaning; and how such inventions as the sewing machine and the cotton gin affected IP rights in textiles and fashion. Each source is preceded by a note placing it in its social, economic, and legal context. The sources are structured in two chapters (business identifiers—trade and certification marks, geographical indications—and appropriation of knowledge and creativity—patents, designs, copyright, and trade secrets) so as to permit an easy understanding of the enchainment of important moments that have contributed to give IP for textiles and fashion its special configuration, in particular the transition from textile law to fashion law. With this book, listening directly to the voices of those who have made and make IP, academics, students, magistrates, professionals, and the legal community as a whole will have a clear and realistic sense of how the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit with the imperatives of human consumption has designed and continues designing the special scope and limits of IP as applied to textiles and fashion.

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the tensions inherent in the interface of proprietary medicines and the strong reaction of society at large in respect of pharmaceutical inventors and rights holders. As this comprehensive collection of sources shows, these tensions have persisted since ancient times. The sources—along with headnotes and a deeply informed preamble—clearly illustrate how society has constructed intellectual property in association with medicines to adapt it to the needs of entrepreneurship and free trade, and, at the same time, accommodating it to the imperatives of public health. Revealing two major lines of tension—trademarks versus generic designations and patents versus trade secrets—the texts deal with such aspects of the special intellectual property of medicines and access to health as the following: the question of whether inventions that are crucially important to save lives should be left in private hands to be exploited with a view on profitability; prohibiting the use of trademarks to designate certain medicines; loss of distinctiveness of some well-known pharmaceutical trademarks; sanitary authorities as a sort of a parallel trademark and patent office; the requirement of higher distinctiveness for pharmaceutical trademarks—the so-called duty of greater care; use of secrecy to secure private interests in pharmaceutical inventions; granting prizes and awards to inventors instead of acknowledging private proprietary rights in pharmaceuticals; and the protection of inventions in times of epidemics. The sources are structured in two chapters (business identifiers—trademarks, geographical indications, shop signs—and appropriation of knowledge—patents, trade secrets) to permit an easy understanding of the enchainment of important moments that have contributed to give intellectual property for medicines its special configuration. The selection of sources (more than 200) underlines the struggle of creative entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical field to obtain a living from their trade and all the contradictions to which it gives rise, as well as approaches that governments have adopted to deal with its tensions. Practitioners in intellectual property law and healthcare law, magistrates, medical professionals, and academics will have a better sense of how the imperatives of public health have designed and continue designing norms and principles of intellectual property especially adapted to the social goals it serves.

Nuno Pires de Carvalho, widely honored for his incomparable research in the origins and development of intellectual property, has devoted a considerable portion of his writing to the role this field of law plays in specific areas of human endeavor, including medicine and fashion. In this book, he brings his meticulous scholarship to bear on how society has constructed intellectual property so as to adapt it to the needs of the industries of food and hospitality and how entrepreneurs have extracted from intellectual property the most appropriate means for capturing knowledge and reputation in these two fields of business. Presenting a comprehensive collection of more than two hundred documentary sources illustrating this evolution since antiquity ¬– with notes explaining the context and relevance of each source – the book delineates the enchainment of important moments in the development of intellectual property in the context of food and hospitality. Along the way, the book details the particular development of such specific aspects as the following: rules against unfair competition among food producers and preparers; patents for culinary recipes, foodstuffs, and hospitality services; exclusions from patentability; marking of goods and containers; inventions of devices and processes in food preparation; identifiers in such industries as cutlery, baking, winemaking, cheesemaking, and brewing; emergence of intellectual property for plant varieties; database protection for organized compilations of recipes. To illustrate some of the peculiarities of intellectual property as applied to food and hospitality, the book includes numerous pictures of patent and copyright claim documents, trademarks, advertisements, labels, culinary book covers, and food preparation devices. Because of the multiple nature of the human activities behind it, food calls for every variant of intellectual property. Thus, this matchless volume will be of great interest to all concerned with any branch of intellectual property law, including practitioners, academics, magistrates, government officials, and even the legal community as a whole. The book will reveal not only the ways intellectual property evolves and adapts to social changes but also how intellectual property law accommodates the needs and aspirations of entrepreneurs in the fields of food and hospitality.

As "Soul of a New Machine" did for the nascent digital age, "Digital Babylon" weaves the emerging future of digital entertainment into a compelling personal narrative that illuminates the successes, failures, and uncertainty about the industry's future.

The enemy is among us, waging a war of world political domination against us. We must fight to strike it at its core, or else we will be in serious trouble. The Demystify Sin spiritual manual series deals with a simple brand of truth that exposes the deep darkness and equips us to overcome it in our objective reality. It discusses practical techniques to help us stand on our feet spiritually. This volume explores spiritual dynamics leading to a clear and potentially grave destination as predefined in the Word of God. It serves as the Spirit of God shining the light of the Word into the darkness, revealing the enemy at work, and it offers ways to defend ourselves against that enemy. God has called and appointed author Ola Faseku to undermine and expose the darkness, and Jesus Christ gave him wisdom, revelation, knowledge, and understanding of scriptures and the times, which he shares as truth without fear. This spiritual guide tells how we will deal with the antichrist and his war that is in progress; how we will contain and dismantle Babylon: satan’s kingdom of darkness on earth.

The fast-evolving relationship between the promotion of welfare-enhancing competition and the balanced protection of intellectual property (IP) rights has attracted the attention of policymakers, analysts and scholars. This interest is inevitable in an environment that lays ever greater emphasis on the management of knowledge and innovation and on mechanisms to ensure that the public derives the expected social and economic benefits from this innovation and the spread of knowledge. This book looks at the positive linkage between IP and competition in jurisdictions around the world, surveying developments and policy issues from an international and comparative perspective. It includes analysis of key doctrinal and policy issues by leading academics and practitioners from around the globe and a cutting-edge survey of related developments across both developed and developing economies. It also situates current policy developments at the national level in the context of multilateral developments, at WIPO, WTO and elsewhere.