Volume 70, Issue 1

Up to now, arbitration in the economy has not been extensively researched. This article uses a selection of arbitration cases from the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate during the Nazi era as a basis to examine the practice of arbitration and the resulting change in function of this conflict resolution mechanism. From this perspective, the analysis not only sheds light on the evolution of arbitration into a partially open legal space but also deconstructs the regime’s purported intervention in the syndicate’s autonomous legal framework.

Dealing with design piracy is a blind spot in German business history, but studies on the importance of industrial property rights as an element of business strategies are also scarce in general. This article uses the example of the «Barmer Artikel», a specific segment of Wuppertal’s textile industry, during the period from the 1920s to the 1960s to examine how market strategies as well as legal disputes, conflict behaviour and juridical solutions were mutually dependent with regard to design protection. It shows that the enforcement of intellectual property rights was primarily a question of opportunity costs and that both plaintiffs and defendants carefully considered their actions, e.g. whether they appealed to the local arbitration court, took ordinary legal action or whether they avoided proceedings altogether. The findings reveal that property rights regimes are contingent and are equally determined by legal and economic considerations. As a result, the theoretical enforceability of property rights was factually more important than their practical enforcement.

The article examines the question of how brand companies deal with cases of brand piracy and which strategies they use to avoid legal disputes or enforce their property rights and competitive advantages. Using the spirits manufacturer Jägermeister as an example, it can be shown that not only in cases of pure plagiarism but also in cases of associative brand approximations, both judicial and extrajudicial measures were consistently pursued. In this context, informal negotiation processes, which could also be reflected in special agreements between the competitors, played an important role in conflict regulation, as confirmed in relation to the main competitor Underberg.

The Hessian metallurgical company Isabellenhütte Gmbh in Dillenburg was a science-based company that applied for and was granted a number of patents from the late 19th century onwards. Among these was a patent for «iron-containing manganese copper alloys» issued in 1917. The article examines the strategies that the company used to observe and challenge competing patents of other companies, such as Metallgesellschaft AG, Frankfurt a.M. As a small, family-run company, Isabellenhütte was most likely to be successful in its efforts to bring down such competing patents if, on the one hand, there was a factual basis for the correctness of its assessment and, on the other hand, it had the support of a patent attorney.