History and Identity
A 1986 master's thesis
Before the journal, there was a question. In 1986, in the master's programme at PUC-Rio, a lawyer from Sergipe defended Algumas considerações sobre a transferência de tecnologia no Brasil — a study of Normative Act 15, the Brazilian patent office, foreign capital and national industrial policy. The underlying question was easy to state and hard to answer: when a country buys technology from abroad, does it become more independent, or less?
The author was Carla Eugenia Caldas Barros. One of her two supervisors was Denis Borges Barbosa. Twenty-six years later the two would found PIDCC together — and technology transfer remains, to this day, among the most recurrent subjects across the whole collection.
PIDCC was not born of a funding call or a graduate programme. It was born of a master's question that never exhausted itself.
The Northeast as a place to speak from
A law graduate of the Federal University of Sergipe in 1981, with studies at the universities of Nancy in France and a doctorate at PUC-SP on improvement and dependency in patents, Carla Caldas returned to Aracaju and did something uncommon: instead of treating intellectual property as a matter for the Rio–São Paulo axis, she treated it as a matter for the Northeast.
In 2005 she proposed the creation of an intellectual property centre at UFS. In 2008 she organised the First Northeastern Seminar on Intellectual Property — SENEPI, which ran annually for five editions until 2012. In 2009 she founded NEAPI, the Centre for Advanced Studies in Intellectual Property, certified by CNPq. That same year she wrote a text whose title says everything: Intellectual property: Tobias Barreto – Rui Barbosa, later published in this journal.
An implicit thesis was at work: the region that gave the country Tobias Barreto and Rui Barbosa had something to say about intellectual goods. What it lacked was somewhere to say it.
30 September 2012
The journal appeared with seven works and the name it still carries: Revista de Propriedade Intelectual — Direito Contemporâneo e Constituição, E-ISSN 2316-8080. Electronic, open access, edited in Aracaju.
The name is a programme. This is not a journal about intellectual property: it is a journal about the tension between intellectual property and the constitutional order. Between the right to exclude and the rights of access — to knowledge, health, education and culture. The subjects the collection gathers most say so plainly: alongside patents, trade marks and industrial design stand human rights, social function, public health and TRIPS.
In the fourth issue, on completing its first year, the editorial office set out the profile it intended: open to national and international contributors, to monographs and to thematic issues — and, explicitly, to philosophical meditation on technics and on the crisis of contemporary society, within the horizon of the phenomenological and hermeneutic schools.
The door almost no law journal opens
That sentence from 2013 was not rhetoric. It explains why, in a journal of law, the most frequent subjects in the collection include technics, phenomenology and Heidegger.
Alongside articles on compulsory licensing and plant varieties, PIDCC published Habermas and the question of technics, the paradox of the technical society, Vattimo and post-modernity, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and dwelling poetically on the earth. It is rare company — and deliberate. If the central question is what technics does to life in common, then the jurist debating a pharmaceutical patent and the philosopher debating the essence of technics are addressing the same problem through two doors.
This coexistence is what sets PIDCC apart: a legal journal that treats the philosophy of technics not as ornament, but as foundation.
The mentor
Denis Borges Barbosa (1948–2016) was, in the editorial office's own words, one of the journal's originators — and, later, its mentor and godfather. A musician trained at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague before becoming a jurist; a master's student under Fábio Konder Comparato; an LLM from Columbia; a doctorate from UERJ; attorney-general of the Brazilian patent office; a Brazilian delegate in the international negotiations that preceded the TRIPS Agreement. He wrote more than fifty books. He taught for free at PUC-Rio, at the patent office and at UFRJ, and made a point of distributing his writings freely.
He died in June 2016. The journal published, as its editorial, the text written by his son — In praise of the (productive) life of Denis Borges Barbosa. The following issue opened by recording that it was the first without him. A year later, presenting the twentieth issue, the editor-in-chief wrote that the journal was carrying on now without its mentor, and reaffirmed its willingness to welcome innovative work at odds with traditional positions in intellectual property.
Two special issues, two ways of giving thanks
The journal placed its two greatest debts in two special issues.
Special Issue vol. 2, no. 1 — 2019
Thirteen works by Denis Borges Barbosa: prior consent from the health authority, industrial designs, industrial applicability, the social function of intellectual property rights. It closes with a study by Maristela Basso written, as its very title says, from the teachings of the master.
Seven works by Constança Marcondes César on the question of technics in Habermas, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty and Vattimo — the journal's other pole, gathered in one place.
One issue for the jurist who helped it come into being; another for the philosopher who gave it its second voice.
Who kept the journal running
No journal is made of text alone. Between the accepted manuscript and the article one reads there is layout, a server, a system, backups, files that must not be lost — work that only becomes visible when it fails.
For more than a decade, until early 2026, that work was done by Sérgio D'Santana, responsible for PIDCC's technical management: the journal website, the typesetting of each issue, the upkeep of the platform and the custody of the collection. It was he who kept the journal this page describes online, issue after issue.
The 2012–2025 collection reached the recataloguing process intact because someone looked after it all those years. The credit for PIDCC having had something to recatalogue is his.
Today
The collection holds 356 works by 277 authors, across articles, monographs, book reviews, case law, translations and editorials, authored from several regions of Brazil and beyond. All content is open access and every work carries its own DOI.
Scientific direction has passed to Prof. Dr. Yan Capua Charlot, with the founder remaining as Honorary Editor-in-Chief — the full composition is on the Editorial Team page. The heaviest stage is complete: the whole collection, from 2012 to 2025, has been recatalogued and migrated to Open Journal Systems, with normalised metadata, persistent identifiers deposited with Crossref and bibliographic references registered. The journal now operates under continuous publication in a single annual volume.
The current stage is a different one: expansion, internationalisation and indexing. New sections with shorter review cycles, an editorial body reaching beyond Brazil, publication in English and applications to further databases — so that what was published over these years remains findable, citable and readable long after us.
PIDCC continues to welcome what the intellectual property tradition tends to leave out: the constitutional argument, the human right, the philosophical question — and the voice of those who write far from the major centres.
