Multiple Loyalties: Hybrid Patent Regimes in the Habsburg Empire and Its Successor States

In the mid-nineteenth century, it was the Habsburg Empire rather than any of the Germanic states that set the pattern for patent regulation in central Europe. Its statute for patent privileges in 1852 involved a strict definitions of novelty and explicit documentary demands for patent specifications across its territories. However, as the evolving German patent system became the dominant external reference point in later decades, leading figures in Austro-Hungary began to question its imperial patent system and looked increasingly to Berlin for their frameworks, although not excluding reference to Roman, French, and Anglo-American law. Thus a variety of legal traditions and intra-imperial debate wrought changes across the Austro-Hungarian territories that culminated in distinctive national systems once the Empire had dissolved in 1918. This chapter traces both the formal devolution from imperial to national patent systems in Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czech regions as well as the persistent legal and technocratic imperatives that ultimately drew these legacy systems closer to each other again.