A book edited by Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Jose Bellido offers new perspectives on the nature and history of intellectual property law.
Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law (Hart Publishing) draws together the contributions of 13 different scholars, each exploring a specific intellectual property case. In his preface to the volume, Dr Bellido says: ‘All the cases gathered here aim to show the versatile and unstable character of a discipline still searching for landmarks. Each contribution offers an opportunity to raise questions about the retrospective and prospective narratives that have shaped the discipline throughout its short but profound history. Each contribution, furthermore, stretches the parameters of discussion by focusing on a variety of legal and historical features that have purportedly influenced the development of intellectual property.’
The book begins by revisiting patent litigation to consider the impact of the Statute of Monopolies (1624). It continues looking at different controversies to describe how the existence of an author’s right in literary property was a plausible basis for legal argument, even though no statute expressly mentioned authors’ rights before the Statute of Anne (1710). The collection also explores different moments of historical significance for intellectual property law: the first trade mark injunctions; the difficulties the law faced when protecting maps; and the origins of originality in copyright law. Similarly, it considers the different ways of interpreting patent claims in the late nineteenth and twentieth century; the impact of seminal cases on passing off and the law of confidentiality; and more generally, the construction of intellectual property law and its branches in their interaction with new technologies and marketing developments.
A chapter authored by Dr Bellido revisits ‘King Features Syndicate, Inc and Betts v O & M Kleeman Ltd (1940)’. The book is published as part of The Landmark Cases series and is available to buy online.
Dr Bellido has published widely in the field of intellectual property, trade marks and music copyright and has additional research interests in legal theory, and evidence and legal history. He is the Spanish national editor to the digital archive (together with Professor Xalabarder from the Universidad Oberta Catalunya and Professor Casas Valles from the Universitat de Barcelona). This is a major reference work of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing press (c1450) to the Berne Convention (1886) and beyond.
Earlier this year, Dr Bellido (together with Dr Hyo Yoon Kang) was appointed to lead Kent Law School as a research partner institution in a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant of Eur 2.2 million investigating patents and their role in scientific infrastructure. The five-year project ‘Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020‘ began this month.
Dr Bellido is a member of the Governing Board of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Strong Museum of Play (Rochester, New York) in 2017 and at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 2016.