Since the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC, increasingly large portions of the patentee population have no realistic expectation of securing injunctive relief against adjudicated infringers. This judicially imposed quasi-compulsory licensing regime induces well-resourced infringers to decline a license, appropriate patented technology, and negotiate the terms of use through litigation. Costly and protracted litigation is unlikely to adequately remunerate the patent owner whenever infringers have greater litigation resources, lower opportunity costs, and limited expectations of enhanced damages, which can induce the patent owner to settle for an amount that undervalues its technology. These litigation and settlement dynamics are illustrated through case studies of “holdout” tactics employed by well-resourced infringers in recent litigations involving standard-essential patents. To correct for the underdeterrence and undercompensation effects inherent to a no-injunction regime, it is proposed that courts enhance damages by an appropriately calibrated multiplier in all infringement litigations in which injunctive relief is not a practically available remedy.

This chapter examines the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded in East Berlin in 1949. It considers Brecht’s desire to create an ensemble to help realize the theoretical positions he had drafted while in exile and the difficulties the Berliner Ensemble faced in its infancy. These included a lack of theater space for a new company in the wake of the devastation of World War II and intense ideological hostility from the ruling party. At times, the problems encountered posed a direct threat to the BE’s very existence, yet it was the quality of its work that ultimately saved it and allowed it to thrive on the international stage.

When we think of the many ways in which Brecht's work, ideas, and texts have been and are being received, refashioned and recycled, we should of course think—and perhaps in the very first place, rather than at the end of this volume—of the use and usefulness of Brecht in the creative arts, in literature, and the theater in the first instance, but not just there: also in film, in multimedia dialogue, in the visual arts, and so on. Brecht himself was a restless experimenter, and many since have been inspired by his experiments to go on and continue that method, in sympathy with or, occasionally, in bitter opposition to Brecht's own spirit. As we have seen, Brecht entertained a lively dialogue with a very wide range of literary and cultural traditions, always weighing up what he could take from them, adapt, and develop. His innovations often come about in the process of recycling the old, for example his “Epic Theater” as a form of reception of the theater of antiquity and of the Early Modern. As a writer, Brecht was of course not only an innovator in the theater, but also opened up new (and old) poetic forms, experimented with subject matters and registers previously thought “unliterary.” He experimented with what were then new media: writing poems to be distributed as records, plays for the radio, and film treatments, and he created his own multimedia and cross-genre works, the photo-epigrams of War Primer, and even made a “Proposal to combine architecture and lyric poetry.” What fruitful territory this is! It is hardly surprising that later artists have taken up the challenge to continue and develop the experiments.

It is less easy for a primarily academic conference to reflect this sort of work in practice. But for the Oxford symposium we were determined also to develop a cultural program, and the pieces that follow are the best we can do by way of traces of all such activity—the work that can at least somehow be represented in linear written form. Some of this work also leaves a more lasting trace, in the form of photographs and filmic accounts, on the website of the Symposium: http://brecht.mml.ox.ac.uk/ibs-symposium. When this is taken down, we hope to transfer at least a proportion of the material to an Oxford University media and research archive and/or to the IBS website.

This volume of the Brecht Yearbook features a selection of papers given at the Fifteenth Symposium of the International Brecht Society at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, that took place from June 25 to 29, 2016. It is perhaps worth noting that an event that opened a mere two days after the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the European Union offered a model of international cooperation and exchange. The political isolationism and the emotive arguments that seem to have won the day for the Brexiteers would surely have given Brecht, the perennial collaborator, cause for consternation. And, as ever, Brecht can furnish a suitably contradictory commentary from his poem of 1954, “Böser Morgen”: “Unwissende! schrie ich / Schuldbewußt.” (A bad morning: There are things you don't know! I cried. / Knowing I was guilty.)

The theme of the symposium, “Recycling Brecht,” very much traded on the ambiguity of the phrasing in English. “Recycling” is both an activity applied to one of the twentieth century's most productive artists and a description of the notorious recycler himself. Recycling was, in turn, understood in a number of ways. Some speakers discussed the straightforward re-use of material, while others took the term more literally, considering how something already used and used up could gain fresh utility by being taken apart and refunctioned, itself a very Brechtian modus operandi. The organizers were pleasantly surprised that a term that was originally intended as a way of attracting many and varied contributions proved useful in itself as a focus for sophisticated and ingenious interpretations of the recycling process.

We received a broad range of responses to the call for contributions. Brecht's legacy in the theater, in poetry, and in thought regularly figured in the proposals, as well as Brecht's penchant for engaging with all manner of sources in all manner of ways. In the former category, a remarkable number of panels discussed and explored Brecht's international presence, not only in his native Europe, but also in the other four continents. The breadth of reuse was considerable and revealed as much about Brecht as it did about the cultural traditions that engaged with him. In the latter category, the coincidence of the Fifteenth Symposium and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death produced two diverse panels on the relationship between the two playwrights, while others considered Brecht's recycling practices as novelist, playwright, and theorist.