Rudolf Klostermann

Rudolf Klostermann's tomb in the old Bonn cemetery

Eduard Rudolf Hermann Klostermann (born November 17, 1828 in Wengern , † March 10, 1886 in Bonn ) was a German lawyer.

Life

After his secondary school education in food and Emmerich Klostermann studied from 1846 to 1849 in Halle (Saale) , Bonn and Berlin law . In 1850 he began his legal clerkship in Hamm and, after various short-term positions, Klostermann passed the court assessor examination in Bochum in 1856 . In 1857 Bergrat became legal advisor at the Märkisches Bergamt and then moved to the Prussian Ministry of Commerce as an assistant.

Due to his early specialization in the field of mining law, Klostermann was appointed to the Bonn Mining Authority in 1866. After being appointed an honorary doctorate in 1868, he completed his habilitation there and was appointed associate professor in 1871. The focus of his activity was very early on mining law, whose proximity to the technical development of his time finally brought him to the field of patent protection and intellectual property as a whole. In 1873 he was sent by Prussia to attend the Vienna Patent Protection Congress . In 1875 Klostermann was awarded the title of Secret Mountain Ridge.

Klostermann developed a new approach to equip intellectual creations (literature, art and inventions) with self-justifiable protection. For this purpose, he set up the prerequisite for a new (not already known) intellectual work which is accessible to mechanical reproduction and whose creator receives a potential financial advantage through this.

This not only drew an argumentative bracket around the areas of copyright (literature and works of art) and patent law, but also set up a theory of intellectual property that did not have to rely on a natural legal personality substrate of the respective creator. Furthermore, he cleverly evaded the pandectistic concept of property, which allowed "property" only in physical objects, by declaring intellectual property to be a mere concept of art. Because of this, but above all because of his economic argumentation, that every inventor willingly shares his work with the general public, if only he was guaranteed the financial advantage proclaimed by Klostermann, he was able to participate in the so-called free trade movement, which demanded the abolition of all patents as an economic brake beat their own arms.

He had done significant preparatory work for the later legislation of the Empire in this area.

Shortly afterwards, however, his theory of intellectual property was attacked as undifferentiated and simply flawed. In particular, Josef Kohler replaced them with his doctrine of intellectual property and personal rights (no longer derived from natural law). Klostermann also published a commentary on the Prussian mining law and published textbooks on mining law.

Klostermann had been a member and later an honorary member of Corps Teutonia Bonn since 1846. In 1880 he appointed the Association of German Engineers (VDI) as an honorary member because of his services to the drafting of a patent law .

Fonts

• Comments on the draft of a general mining law for the Prussian states , Stubenrauch, Berlin 1863
• The General Mining Act for the Prussian States of June 24, 1865, with introduction and commentary, with comparative consideration of the other German mining laws , Guttentag, Berlin and Leipzig; several editions
• Textbook of Prussian mining law with consideration of the other German mining rights , Guttentag, Berlin 1871
• The patent law for the German Reich of May 25, 1877 with introduction and commentary and with a comparative overview of the foreign patent laws , Vahlen, Berlin 1877
• The patent legislation of all countries together with the laws on design and trademark protection , Guttentag, Berlin 1876
• The intellectual property of writings, works of art and inventions, according to Prussian and international law , Guttentag, Berlin 1867
  • 1. Volume as digitized and full text in the German Text Archive
  • 2nd volume as digitized version and full text in the German Text Archive

literature

• Adolf Arndt:  Klostermann, Rudolf . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 51, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, p. 240 f.
• Margrit Seckelmann: Eduard Hermann Rudolf Klostermann (1828-1886) . In: Simon Apel, Louis Pahlow , Matthias Wießner (eds.): Biographisches Handbuch des Intellectual Property , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, pp. 160–165.

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Klostermann  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Rudolf Klostermann in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 17/35
2. ^ Theodor Peters : History of the Association of German Engineers . Based on papers left by Th. Peters - Published on behalf of the board and completed by 1910. Self-published by the Association of German Engineers, Berlin 1912, p. 54 .