Intellectual Property and Innovation Protection

6The Main Trends of Intellectual Property Regimes

Institutional factors clearly play a key role in explaining the development of common practices in intellectual property and their links with innovation, all the more so as in most countries and for most types of intellectual property there has been a general trend towards extension since the beginning of the 1980s. At first sight and in approximate terms, it is convenient to refer to a trend towards strengthening, even if this interpretation is debatable, as is shown further on. Both political and jurisprudential, the reinforcement in question corresponds in particular to an extension of the protection provided by intellectual property rights, especially in terms of field covered and term. It also involves judicial changes concerning rulings that are more favorable to the entitled parties than before. The development of these intellectual property regimes, which correspond to the advent of a “pro-patent era”, first started in the United States before gradually spreading all over the world.

6.1. A reinforcement trend deriving mostly from America

History is marked by alternating phases of reinforcement and weakening of intellectual property rights regimes especially in relation to patents. Thus, in the middle of the 19th Century most European countries saw the beginning of an anti-patent movement that approximately lasted until the 1870s, a period dominated by the notions of free-trading. In France, for example, a law passed ...