For many years, at least until the early 1970s, intellectual property law caused little bother to politicians nor indeed to businessmen. Intellectual property (although in the 1970s it had still to acquire that accolade) was a rather dusty area of the law, generally of interest only to a small number of specialist practitioners and certain industry sectors such as the pharmaceuticals industry or the jewellery industry (which prompted the Design Copyright Act 1968).
This was to change fundamentally in the 1970s with the growth of consumerism and fundamental technological developments such as the silicon chip and the beginnings of biotechnology. This was reflected in an increased awareness by industry of intellectual property rights, the growth of branding strategies and important developments in both substantive and procedural law. It is perhaps no coincidence that two of the most important procedural re-statements of recent years – Anton Piller and Norwich Pharmacal – arose in the context of protecting intellectual property rights.
