Patent Law Reform Act

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The British Patent Law Reform Act of October 1, 1852 established the first modern patent law in the motherland of the industrial revolution .

The law replaced the old patent law, which was essentially based on the Clerks Act of 1536. Most importantly, it significantly improved the legal position of the inventors:

  • Patents were now valid for the whole of the United Kingdom and no longer had to be applied for individually for England, Scotland and Ireland.
  • Accordingly, the cost fell from around £ 400 to around £ 180 for a national patent.
  • The previously extraordinarily high bureaucratic effort to apply for a patent was reduced.
  • The patent protection became effective from the time of filing - no longer from the time of approval. Before that, every inventor took the risk that the details of his invention were already public for interested parties, but that he had no protection on them.
  • The patent law introduced a novelty check . The inventor's legal uncertainty about losing his patent years later due to a court judgment decreased considerably.

In the years before, there had been an intense public campaign to reform the law, which was supported by all inventors. In many cities were formed Reform Committee , the Mechanics' Magazine became the mouthpiece of the inventors. Before the Reform Act was passed, patent applications got tangled up in the bureaucracy or preferred not to apply for patent protection in the first place. Only a few like James Watt succeeded in gaining a dominant position with the help of the protection of his steam engine .

But after the inventors' public campaign, which focused primarily on the technical details of the law, subsided after 1852, the Reform Act sparked a major debate about patent law itself. In the heyday of liberalism and the free trade movement , patents were seen primarily as a state monopoly that inhibited the economy . In the Economist , a broad front gathering of those who advocated a complete abolition of the law. However, an economic crisis, the decline of classic British liberalism and the social question , which was increasingly engaging in public discussion, prevented these critics from asserting themselves.

In the Netherlands and Switzerland, on the other hand, patent law was completely abolished at the end of the 19th century and only reintroduced at the beginning of the 20th century after intensive industrialization in both countries under international pressure.

The ironic thing about the Reform Act is that it was not until after the industrial revolution that it gave inventors truly effective protection of their intellectual property for the first time. One of the very few studies that exist in this area, HI Dutton's The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution 1750-1842 , also comes to the conclusion that the previous imperfect patent law contributed significantly to the advancement of the industrial revolution.

literature

  • Harold Irvin Dutton: The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution 1750-1852 . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1984, ISBN 0-7190-0997-9 .
  • Peter Kurz: World History of Invention Protection. Inventors and patents as reflected in the times. For the 100th anniversary of the law on patent attorneys of May 21, 1900 . Carl Heymanns Verlag, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-452-24331-1 (on behalf of the Chamber of Patent Attorneys ).