Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

The original signatories were 11 countries: Belgium, Brazil, France, Guatemala, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, El Salvador, Serbia, Spain and Switzerland. The inclusion of trademarks in the agreement enabled patent- less Switzerland and Netherlands to sign up to the Convention. Before the Convention went into effect in July 1884, Britain, Ecuador and Tunisia signed up, bringing the number of original member countries to 14. Subsequently, Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala denounced the Convention, and did not re-join it until the 1990s. The information is from the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) website: http://www.wipo.int/about- ip/en/iprm/pdf/ch5.pdf#paris.

22

They were on the Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and, most importantly, special relativity.

23

It was only in 1911, six years after he finished his Ph.D., that he was made a professor of physics in the University of Zurich.

24

For further details on the history of Swiss patent system, see Schiff (1971), Industrialisation without National Patents – the Netherlands, 1869–1912 and Switzerland, 1850–1907 (Princeton University Press, Princeton).

25

Moreover, the 1817 Dutch patent law was rather deficient even by the standards of the time. It did not require a disclosure of the details of patents, it allowed the patenting of imported inventions, it nullified national patents of inventions that acquired foreign patents and there was no penalty on others using patented products without permission as far as it was for their own business. See Schiff (1971), pp. 19–20.

26

Although Edison made some critical contributions to the development of the filament-based light bulb, he did not single-handedly invent it, as is commonly believed. However, he owned all the relevant patents.

27

According to T. Cochran & W. Miller (1942), The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York, The Macmillan Company), the fact that, between 1820 and 1830, the US produced 535 patents per year against 145 for Great Britain was mainly due to the difference in ‘scruples’ (p. 14). Contrast this to the argument by K. Sokoloff & Z. Khan (2000) that it was thanks to a ‘good’ patent system that the US far exceeded Britain in patenting per capita by 1810, expressed in their paper, ‘Intellectual Property Institutions in the United States: Early Development and Comparative Perspective’, prepared for World Bank Summer Research Workshop on Market Institutions, July 17–19, 2000, Washington, DC, (p. 5). The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

28

Durand made the same statement regarding his 1811 patent of an oil lamp. See S. Shephard (2000), Pickled, Potted & Canned – How the Preservation of Food Changed Civilization (Headline, London), p. 228.

29

According to this Act, ‘it [was] a penal offence to sell an article made abroad which has upon it any word or mark leading the purchaser to believe that it is made in England, in the absence of other words denoting the real place of origin’ As cited in E. Williams (1896), ‘Made in Germany’ (William Henemann, London), p. 137. The edition consulted is the 1973 edition with an introduction by Austen Albu (The Harvester Press, Brighton).

30

For further details, see Williams (1896), p. 138.

31

Williams (1896), p. 138.

32

The prominent business economist John Kay makes this point brilliantly in a satire featuring Virginia Woolf and her time-travelling literary agent. See J. Kay (2002), ‘Copyright law’s duty to creativity’, The Financial Times, October 23 2002.

33

Jaffe & Lerner (2004), p.94. The average was not quite 20 years at that time because some poor countries were yet to fully comply with TRIPS.

34

Chemical (including pharmaceutical) substances remained unpatentable until 1967 in West Germany, 1968 in the Nordic countries, 1976 in Japan, 1978 in Switzerland and 1992 in Spain. Pharmaceutical products remained unpatentable until 1959 in France, 1979 in Italy and 1992 in Spain. The information is from S. Patel (1989), ‘Intellectual Property Rights in the Uruguay Round – A Disaster for the South?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6 May 1989, p. 980, and G. Dutfield & U. Suthersanen (2004), ‘Harmonisation or Differentiation in Intellectual Property Protection? – The Lessons of History’, Occasional Paper 15 (Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva), pp. 5–6.

35

With TRIPS, developing countries have been compelled to introduce pharmaceutical product patents, at the latest by 2013 in the case of the poorest countries. When the TRIPS agreement came into effect in 1995, developing countries were to comply to it by 2001. The poorest countries (the Least Developed Countries, or LDCs) were given until 2006, but, at the end of 2005, this was extended to 2013.

36

Dutfield & Suthersanen (2004), p. 6.