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
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
Phillips, William H.;
(2010)
The Democratization of Invention in the American South: Antebellum and Postbellum Technology Markets in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001211701/)
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
Yi, Doogab;
(2011)
Who Owns What? Private Ownership and the Public Interest in Recombinant DNA Technology in the 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB001220006/)
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/)
Article
Asuka Imaizumi;
(April 2022)
Widespread Enthusiasm: Grassroots Participation and Regional Variation in Early Japanese Patenting, 1885–99
(/isis/citation/CBB599282905/)
Be the first to comment!