8 - Industrial “Property”, Law, and the Politics of Invention in Greece, 1900–1940

Summary

The co-construction of “industrial property” law and the culture of invention in Greece occurred most prominently from the first patent law of 1920 up to World War II. I unravel the political and industrial contexts of the emergence of Greece’s first patent law, focusing on the role of engineering figures both in framing patent rights as a privilege conferred upon inventors and in pressing toward new legislation. The resulting 1920 patent law was an incomplete attempt to represent the legal status of patents in terms of rights rather than of privilege. The new Greek law that emerged was thus a compromise between ideological pressures for homogenization and the need to innovate through imitation. Overall this chapter contextualizes this development within the impact of transnational patent legislation in constructing a culture of propertization of knowledge and more particularly in techno-science in Greece. The research is based mainly on published archival material most importantly on technical and legal journals, public press, and legal books of the period.