Origin and development of Intellectual Property Rights

Every time you pay for a song on a streaming app, you are using a system that began with a simple fight about printing presses. Three hundred years ago, printers in London wanted the law to protect their books from rivals. The law they got, in 1710, changed the question from who owns the press to who owns the work. India’s story runs through a colonial statute, a post-independence committee and a global trade deal. How did we get from there to here?

In two minutes

Intellectual property law moved from royal privileges and printers’ monopolies in early-modern Europe to national statutes in the nineteenth century, to international conventions (Paris 1883, Berne 1886) and finally to the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement (1994), which drove India’s reforms of 1999 to 2005.

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