THE PROTECTION OF INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY, PARIS 1883

Today, The Grandma is at home preparing new material for future courses. She has been thinking about the Intellectual Property, and she has decided to read about the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, that was signed on a day like today in 1883.

The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, signed in Paris, France, on 20 March 1883, was one of the first intellectual property treaties.

It established a Union for the protection of industrial property.

The Convention is currently still in force. The substantive provisions of the Convention fall into three main categories: national treatment, priority right and common rules.

According to Articles 2 and 3 of this treaty, juristic and natural persons who are either national of or domiciled in a state party to the Convention shall, as regards the protection of industrial property, enjoy in all the other countries of the Union, the advantages that their respective laws grant to nationals.

In other words, when an applicant files an application for a patent or a trademark in a foreign country member of the Union, the application receives the same treatment as if it came from a national of this foreign country. Furthermore, if the intellectual property right is granted, the owner benefits from the same protections and the same legal remedy against any infringement as if the owner was a national owner of this right.

More information: WIPO

The Convention priority right, also called Paris Convention priority right or Union priority right, was also established by Article 4 of the Paris Convention, and is regarded as one of the cornerstones of the Paris Convention.

It provides that an applicant from one contracting State shall be able to use its first filing date (in one of the contracting States) as the effective filing date in another contracting State, provided that the applicant, or his successor in title, files a subsequent application within 6 months (for industrial designs and trademarks) or 12 months (for patents and utility models) from the first filing.

After a diplomatic conference in Paris in 1880, the Convention was signed on 20 March 1883 by 11 countries: Belgium, Brazil, France, Guatemala, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, El Salvador, Serbia, Spain and Switzerland. Guatemala, El Salvador and Serbia denounced and reapplied the convention via accession.

The Treaty was revised at Brussels, Belgium, on 14 December 1900, at Washington, United States, on 2 June 1911, at The Hague, Netherlands, on 6 November 1925, at London, on 2 June 1934, at Lisbon, Portugal, on 31 October 1958, and at Stockholm, Sweden, on 14 July 1967. It was amended on 28 September 1979.

As of January 2019, the Convention has 177 contracting member countries, which makes it one of the most widely adopted treaties worldwide.

The Paris Convention is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), based in Geneva, Switzerland.

More information: WIPO

The most important thing about intellectual property
vs. creative expression is that copyright law
was created not to stifle creativity
but to encourage creativity.

Shepard Fairey