This innovative book explores forgotten disputes over intellectual property and the ways in which creative people and sovereigns have managed these disputes throughout the centuries. With a focus on reform, it raises important questions about the resilience of legal rules and challenges the methodology behind traditional legal analyses. Focusing on lore and traditions, expert contributors incorporate contextual understandings that are rooted in history, sociology, political science, and literary studies into their analyses.

This volume offers a detailed account of the development of national patent systems, and then moving on to the international sphere to discuss the factors which provided the impetus for the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883).