This collection of essays, by leading scholars and practitioners from a range of countries, pays homage to a pre-eminent figure in the field of intellectual property: Sam Ricketson. Inspired by the breadth of Ricketson’s work, the contributions explore issues from a perspective that looks across the field – in particular, across the regimes, jurisdictions, disciplines and professions of IP. Topics explored across the regimes include the nature of IP subject matter, overlaps in protection, historical connections between copyright and patents and the transplantation of civil law moral rights to common law copyright. In across jurisdictions, chapters address, inter alia, the application of private international law to cross-border IP disputes, the Berne Convention and AI-authored works, how countries might exit the Berne Convention and dispute settlement under TRIPS. The intersection of copyright and privacy laws, the relationship between privacy, personality and trade mark laws, the teaching of IP and human rights and the conduct of empirical and historical research in IP are among the matters considered across disciplines. Contributions across professions include the participation of scholars in IP policy making, the IP textbook in legal practice, and the role of expert evidence in IP litigation.

This chapter considers the challenges of undertaking historical research into intellectual property law, from physical, intellectual and methodological challenges, through to challenges of reaching the right audience and conveying relevance. It provides a broad overview of the different kinds of intellectual property histories and legal histories being undertaken and seeks to encourage more students and scholars to engage in rigorous historical research that is based upon primary sources and attentive to the duties and responsibilities of the disciplines of both law and history.

Sam Ricketson was the first to comprehensively delineate and describe, in Australia, the various parts of the area of law which has come to be known as intellectual property. In addition, Sam has written seminal works on international treaties, and has been a participant, commentator on and observer of law reform throughout his career. This chapter reviews some aspects of his long and distinguished career as a researcher, teacher, advocate and mentor and discusses the tensions involved in academic engagement in law reform, including the role that academics have performed in law reform bodies and how it all fits into the demand to do more impact and engagement.

Given all the circumstances surrounding the attempts to oversee the performance of legal academics and their research efforts, it is remarkable that Sam Ricketson has written and published his treatises on the law of intellectual property (in Australia), the 100-year history of the Berne Convention and the Paris Convention. Hindsight is always 20/20 as noted so frequently by the courts when considering inventiveness and what was obvious at a given prior point in time. it was not obvious at the time of commencing these works that they would be so successful Yet hindsight tells us that Ricketson’s decisions to invest so much of his time and energy into writing his treatises were rational and obvious decisions and the outcomes for both himself and the multiple audiences that enjoy the fruits of his labour equally predictable.