Brennan on Publication in the History of Patents and Copyright: Harmony or Happenstance?

David J. Brennan, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, has published Publication in the History of Patents and Copyright: Harmony or Happenstance? in Across intellectual property: essays in honour of Sam Ricketson edited by Graeme Austin, Andrew Christie, Andrew Kenyon, Megan Richardson (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Here is the abstract.

Aspects of patent and copyright law might be better understood by a greater appreciation of a shared history between patent and copyright law. Such an appreciation leads to the recognition that, ostensibly, the resolution of the question of literary property could have sparked a reshaping of patent doctrines in the late 18th Century, and that in turn those patent doctrines could have had a reciprocal influence upon an important aspect of English copyright law of the 19th Century. While these connections are speculative, when patent history and copyright history are put in overlay, the connections emerge as plausible ones.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.