The Paris Convention began in 1883. For 130 years it has permeated intellectual property law. The increased globalization of commerce and intellectual property makes the Paris Convention more important now than ever before.
Most practitioners know of Article 4 of the Paris Convention, which establishes the familiar 12-month and 6-month priority periods for patents, industrial designs, and trademarks. Few practitioners, however, have actually read Article 4 and understood it fully, let alone the rest of the Convention.
One person has given more thought to the Paris Convention and its history than any other, and it is G. H. C. Bodenhausen. Fortunately for the intellectual property community, he memorialized his thoughts in this book. Published in 1969 by WIPO, it fell out of print. WIPO makes a PDF scan of the book available here free of charge. The scan is 256 pages in length. A paperbound reprint from the PDF scan, trim size of 6.1 by 9.1 inches, is available here at a higher price.
The printing that you can get here is remastered and costs less, and is clearer and easier to read than the free PDF scan. The trim size is A4, and the book has 174 pages.
About the Author: Prof. Georg Hendrik Christiaan Bodenhausen (born 11 July 1905, Utrecht) was a Dutch civil servant. He was director of the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI) from 1963 to 1970, and the first director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) from 1970 to 1973.
