Article ID: CBB306887041

Law machines: Scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law (October 2011)

unapi

Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model could be set on a table, pointed at, picked up, rotated or upended so as to display a point of interest to a particular audience within the courtroom, and, crucially, set in motion to reveal the ‘mode of operation’ of a machine. The immediate object of demonstration was to distinguish the intangible invention from its tangible embodiment, but models also ‘machined’ patent law itself. Demonstrations of patent claims with models articulated and resolved a set of conceptual tensions that still make the definition and apprehension of the invention difficult, even today, but they resolved these tensions in the register of materiality, performativity and visibility, rather than the register of conceptuality. The story of models tells us something about how inventions emerge and subsist within the context of patent litigation and patent doctrine, and it offers a starting point for renewed reflection on the question of how technology becomes property.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB306887041/

Similar Citations

Book Matsuura, Jeffrey H.; (2008)
Jefferson vs. the Patent Trolls: A Populist Vision of Intellectual Property Rights (/isis/citation/CBB000954251/)

Article Khan, B. Zorina; (2013)
Going for Gold: Industrial Fairs and Innovation in the Nineteenth-Century United States (/isis/citation/CBB001320689/)

Article Mario Biagioli; Marius Buning; (2018)
“Technologies of the Law/ Law as a Technology” (/isis/citation/CBB983863737/)

Book Jessica Silbey; (2015)
The Eureka Myth: Creators, innovators, and everyday intellectual property (/isis/citation/CBB476761641/)

Book B. Zorina Khan; (2020)
Inventing ideas : patents, prizes, and the knowledge economy (/isis/citation/CBB655098948/)

Article Beauchamp, Christopher; (2010)
Who Invented the Telephone? Lawyers, Patents, and the Judgments of History (/isis/citation/CBB001230632/)

Article Regele, Lindsay Schakenbach; (January 2018)
The World’s Best Carpets: Erastus Bigelow and the Financing of Antebellum Innovation (/isis/citation/CBB469460823/)

Article Hyo Yoon Kang; (2018)
Ghosts of Inventions: Patent Law’s Digital Mediations (/isis/citation/CBB448268694/)

Article Carroll, P. Thomas; (Summer 2009)
The Railroad Spike (/isis/citation/CBB506581880/)

Article Mario Biagioli; (2018)
Weighing Intellectual Property: Can We Balance the Social Costs and Benefits of Patenting? (/isis/citation/CBB212757503/)

Article Jose Bellido; (2023)
Patents In Miniature: The Effects of Microfilm as an Information Technology, 1938–68 (/isis/citation/CBB263799726/)

Article Stathis Arapostathis; (2018)
Marconi’s Legal Battles: Discursive, Textual, and Material Entanglements (/isis/citation/CBB218081238/)

Book Con Díaz Gerardo; (2019)
Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America (/isis/citation/CBB992270814/)

Chapter Samuelson, Pamela; (2011)
The Strange Odyssey of Software Interfaces as Intellectual Property (/isis/citation/CBB001221563/)

Article Brad Sherman; (2018)
Intangible Machines: Patent Protection for Software in the United States (/isis/citation/CBB843796158/)

Article Mercelis, Joris; (2012)
Leo Baekeland's Transatlantic Struggle for Bakelite: Patenting Inside and Outside of America (/isis/citation/CBB001250064/)

Article Mario Biagioli; Alain Pottage; (2021)
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body (/isis/citation/CBB302669888/)

Authors & Contributors
Biagioli, Mario
Khan, B. Zorina
Bellido, Jose
Con Diaz, Gerardo
Silbey, Jessica
Regele, Lindsay Schakenbach
Concepts
Patents
Intellectual property
Technology and law
Inventors and invention
Technological innovation
Technology and society
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
20th century, early
Meiji period (Japan, 1868-1910)
Places
United States
Americas
Germany
Europe
Massachusetts (U.S.)
Great Britain
Institutions
Marconi Company
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment