ABSTRACT
Since the late eighteenth century, intellectual property (IP) has developed into a major institution regulating the national, international and transnational traffic and exchange of material and immaterial goods. Now consolidated as an indispensable regulating mechanism of modern knowledge and free-market society, the historical evolution and worldwide expansion of intellectual property has been neither unilinear nor synchronic. Framed as the intersection between private and public interests, the development of intellectual property rights (IPRs) reflects the diachronic wrangling that occurs in order to balance and regulate access to, and distribution of, knowledge between creative labor, commercial interests and the common good. The consolidation and expansion of intellectual property rights followed on the heels of major social, economic, cultural and technological transformations that helped reconfigure the structures of modern European societies. These profound changes demarcated the passage from the mercantilist to the liberal economy, from manufacture to industrial production, from the dynastic to the democratic state, and finally from estate-based society to that defined by modern class. Intellectual property— among other institutions—has played a decisive role in regulating the dynamism and transformational capacity of modern societies and cultures.
