BOOK: Robert P. MERGES, American Patent Law: A Business and Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 450pp., ISBN 9781009123419, £105

 

(image courtesy: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

Students and established scholars of intellectual property law often look for historical context when trying to understand the development and present-day contours of IP rules and systems. American Patent Law supplies this context, offering readers a comprehensive account of the evolution of the US patent system and patent doctrine beginning in 1790. From the technologies for harvesting wood and shoemaking in the earliest periods to computer software and biotechnology of the present, each chapter of the book covers the characteristic technologies of each historical era. The book also describes how businesspeople in each era acquired and enforced patents and used patents as the foundation of various business arrangements. This book is a landmark in the history of technologies, the US patent system, and the way private actors have deployed patents across American history.

Table of contents: 

1. Introduction: Overview and themes
2. Founding era patent law, 1790-1820
3. The Jacksonian era and early industrialization, 1820-1880
4. Corporatization, 1880-1920
5. 1921-1982: Patents in and out of the headlines
6. The federal circuit era
7. In conclusion: The private (law) life of patents.

About the author: 

Robert Merges is a professor of law at Berkeley Law (University of California), where he co-directs the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. He has been writing about patents and patent law for over thirty years.

More information can be found here. 

BOOK: Graeme GOODAY & Steven WILF (Eds.), Patent Cultures - Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 2020). ISBN 9781108475761, 95.00 GBP

 

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press has published a book on the history of different patent systems.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book explores how dissimilar patent systems remain distinctive despite international efforts towards harmonization. The dominant historical account describes harmonization as ever-growing, with familiar milestones such as the Paris Convention (1883), the World Intellectual Property Organization's founding (1967), and the formation of current global institutions of patent governance. Yet throughout the modern period, countries fashioned their own mechanisms for fostering technological invention. Notwithstanding the harmonization project, diversity in patent cultures remains stubbornly persistent. No single comprehensive volume describes the comparative historical development of patent practices. Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective seeks to fill this gap. Tracing national patenting from imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century to our time, this work asks fundamental questions about the limits of globalization, innovation's cultural dimension, and how historical context shapes patent policy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the contested role of patents in the modern world.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds

Graeme Gooday is Professor of the History of Science and Technology in the University of Leeds' School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science. From 2007–10 he led the AHRC-funded project Owning and Disowning Invention, which produced the prize-winning Patently Contestable (2013) with co-author Stathis Arapostathis. He was also co-leader with Claire L. Jones of the international research network Rethinking Patent Cultures (2014), the first workshop of which generated this volume.

Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut

Steven Wilf is the Anthony J. Smits Professor of Global Commerce at the University of Connecticut Law School where he founded the Intellectual Property program. He has served as Microsoft Fellow at Princeton University and Abraham L. Kaminstein Scholar in Residence at the United States Copyright Office. He is the author of The Law before the Law (2008), Law's Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (Cambridge, 2010), and numerous articles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I. Introductory:

1. Diversity versus harmonization in patent history: an overview Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf

2. The 1883 Paris Convention and the impossible unification of industrial property Gabriel Galvez-Behar

3. One for all? The American patent system and harmonization of international intellectual property laws Zorina Khan

Part II. Americas: Technical Imaginaries:

4. US patent models as specimen and specification Courtney Fullilove

5. Mexico and the puzzle of partial harmonization: nineteenth-century patent Law reconsidered Edward Beatty

6. An early patent system in Latin America: the Chilean case, 1840s–1900s Bernardita Escobar Andrae

Part III. Southern Europe:

7. The Italian patent system during the long nineteenth century: from privileges to property rights in a latecomer industrializing country Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta

8. Industrial 'property', law, and the politics of invention in Greece, 1900–1940 Stathis Arapostathis

9. Mediation and harmonization: construction of the Spanish patent system in the twentieth century Ana Romero de Pablos

Part IV. Central and Eastern Europe:

10. The struggle over 'the social function of intellectual work in the economy of nations': engineers, patent law, and enterprise inventions in Germany and their European significance Karl Hall

11. Multiple loyalties: hybrid patent regimes in the Habsburg empire and its successor states Karl Hall

12. Patent debates on invention from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union Karl Hall

Part V. Asia:

13. Patent policy in India under the British Raj: a bittersweet story of empire and innovation Rajesh Sagar

14. The India twist to patent culture: investigating its history Tania Sebastian

15. The life and times of patent no. 2,670: industrial property and public knowledge in early twentieth-century Japan Kjell Ericson

Part VI. Epilogue:

16. Postscript Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf.

 

More info here

BOOK: Oren BRACHA, ed., The History of Intellectual Property Law [Critical Concepts in Intellectual Property Law Series] (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing , 2018). ISBN 978178536 8554, £517.50

(Source: Edward Elgar Publishing)

Edward Elgar Publishing has just published a two-volume collection which includes some of the most important and influential articles published on the history of intellectual property law.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This comprehensive two-volume collection includes some of the most important and influential articles published on the history of intellectual property. The seminal works compiled in these volumes encompass a broad variety of specific legal fields, periods and methodological perspectives. The collection focuses on the three main subfields of intellectual property: patent, copyright and trademark law. Volume I covers patent and copyright in Britain as well as U.S. patents. Volume II discusses U.S. copyright and trademarks along with colonial and international intellectual property law.

With an original introduction by the editor, this essential compilation will be of great interest to legal historians, economic historians and anyone interested in intellectual property and its history.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents:

Volume I

Introduction Oren Bracha

PART I. EARLY ORIGINS
1. Pamela O. Long (1991), ‘Invention, Authorship, "Intellectual Property," and the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History’, Technology and Culture, 32 (4), October, 846–84
2. Joanna Kostylo (2010), ‘From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent’, in Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds), Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright, Chapter 1, Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 21–50
3. Carlo Marco Belfanti (2004), ‘Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy During the Early Modern Age’, Technology and Culture, 45 (3), July, 569–89
4. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (1991), ‘Invention and the State in 18th-Century France’, Technology and Culture, 32 (4), October, 911–31
5. Martha Woodmansee (1984) ‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the “Author”’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 17 (4), Summer, 425–48

PART II. BRITISH PATENTS
6. Chris R. Kyle (1988), ’But a New Button to an Old Coat: The Enactment of the Statute of Monopolies, 21 James I cap.3’, Journal of Legal History, 19 (3), December, 203–23
7. Adam Mossoff (2001), ‘Rethinking the Development of Patents: An Intellectual History, 1550–1800’, Hastings Law Journal, 52 (6), August, 1255–322
8. John N. Adams and Gwen Averley (1986), ‘The Patent Specification: The Role of Liardet v. Johnson’, Journal of Legal History, 7 (2), September, 156–77
9. Eric Robinson (1972), ‘James Watt and the Law of Patents’, Technology and Culture, 13 (2), April, 115–39
10. Christine MacLeod (1999), ‘Negotiating the Rewards of Invention: The Shop-Floor Inventor in Victorian Britain’, Business History, 41 (2), April, 17–36

PART III. BRITISH COPYRIGHT
11. Ian Gadd (2016), ‘The Stationer’s Company in England before 1710’, in Isabella Alexander and H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui (eds), Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law, Chapter 5, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 81–95
12. Ronan Deazley (2010), ‘The Statute of Anne and the Great Abridgement Swindle’, Houston Law Review, 47 (4), December, 793–818
13. Mark Rose (1988), ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’, Representations, 23, Summer, 51–85
14. H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui (2014), ‘Copyright at Common Law in 1774—’, Connecticut Law Review, 47 (1), November, 1–57 
15. Will Slauter (2013) ‘Upright Piracy: Understanding the Lack of Copyright for Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Book History, 16 (1), 34–61
16. Isabella Alexander (2007), 'Criminalising Copyright: A Story of Publishers, Pirates and Pieces of Eight', Cambridge Law Journal, 66 (3), November, 625–56
17. Jose Bellido and Kathy Bowrey (2014), ‘From the Author to the Proprietor: Newspaper Copyright and The Times (1842–1956)’, Journal of Media Law, 6 (2), 206–33

PART IV. THE U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL CLAUSE 

18. Tyler T. Ochoa and Mark Rose (2002), ‘The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause’, Journal, Copyright Society of the U.S.A., 49 (3), 675–706
19. L. Ray Patterson and Craig Joyce (2003), 'Copyright in 1791: An Essay Concerning the Founders' View of the Copyright Power Granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution', Emory Law Journal, 52, 909–52
PART V. AMERICAN PATENTS
20. Mario Biagioli (2006), ‘Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors’, Social Research, 73 (4), Winter, 1129–72
21. Steven Lubar (1991), ‘The Transformation of Antebellum Patent Law’, Technology and Culture’, 32 (4), October, 932–59
22. Kara W. Swanson (2009), ‘The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner’, Technology and Culture, 50 (3), July, 519–48
23. Adam Mossoff (2011), ‘The Rise and Fall of the First American Patent Thicket: The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s’, Arizona Law Review, 53 (1), 165–21
24. Alain Pottage and Brad Sherman (2007), 'Organisms and Manufactures: On the History of Plant Inventions', Melbourne University Law Review, 31 (2), 539–68

25. Steven W. Usselman and Richard R. John (2006), ‘Patent Politics: Intellectual Property, the Railroad Industry, and the Problem of Monopoly’, Journal of Policy History, 18 (1), 96–125
26. Catherine L. Fisk (1998), ‘”Removing the Fuel” of Interest from the ‘Fire of Genius’: Law and the Employee Inventor, 1830-1930’, University of Chicago Law Review, 65 (4), Autumn, 1127–99
27. Kara W. Swanson (2011), ‘Getting a Grip on the Corset: Gender, Sexuality, and Patent Law’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism’, 23 (1), 57–115
28. Christopher Beauchamp (2016), ‘The First Patent Litigation Explosion’, Yale Law Journal, 125 (4), February, 848–944

Volume II

An introduction to both volumes by the editor appears in volume 1

PART I. AMERICAN COPYRIGHT
1. Jane C. Ginsburg (1990), ‘A Tale of Two Copyrights: Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America', Tulane Law Review, 64 (5), May, 991–1031
2. Meredith L. McGill (1997), ‘The Matter of the Text: Commerce, Print Culture, and the Authority of the State in American Copyright Law’, American Literary History, 9 (1), Spring, 21–59
3. Oren Bracha (2008), ‘The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early American Copyright’, Yale Law Journal, 118 (2), November, 186–271
4. Robert Brauneis (2009), ‘The Transformation of Originality in the Progressive-Era Debate over Copyright in News’, Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, 27 (2), 321–73
5. Zvi S. Rosen (2007), ‘The Twilight of the Opera Pirates: A Prehistory of the Exclusive Right of Public Performance for Musical Compositions’, Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, 24, 1157–1218

PART II TRADEMARKS
6. Paul Duguid (2009), ‘French Connections: The International Propagation of Trademarks in the Nineteenth Century’, Enterprise and Society, 10 (1), March 3–37
7. Lionel Bently (2007), ‘The Making of Modern Trade Mark Law: The Construction of the Legal Concept of Trade Mark 1860–80’, in Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis and Jane C. Ginsburg (eds), Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique, Chapter 1, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3–41
8. Robert G. Bone (2006), ‘Hunting Goodwill: A History of the Concept of Goodwill in Trademark Law’, Boston University Law Review, 86 (3), June, 547–622
9. Steven Wilf (2008), ‘The Making of the Post-War Paradigm in American Intellectual Property Law’, Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts, 31 (2), 139–207

PART III COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
10. Lionel Bently (2007), ‘Copyright, Translations, and Relations Between Britain and India in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Chicago-Kent Law Review, 82 (3), 1181–240
11. Michael D. Birnhack (2011), ‘Hebrew Authors and English Copyright Law in Mandate Palestine’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 12 (1), January, 201–40

PART IV INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
12. Lionel Bently and Brad Sherman (2001), ‘Great Britain and the Signing of the Berne Convention in 1886: Part 2’, Journal, Copyright Society of the U.S.A., 48 (3), Spring, 311–40
13. Catherine Seville (2008), ‘Authors as Copyright Campaigners: Mark Twain’s Legacy’, Journal, Copyright Society of the U.S.A., 55 (2/3), Winter/Spring, 283–359

PART V ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES
14. B. Zorina Khan (1995), ‘Property Rights and Patent Litigation in Early Nineteenth-Century America’, Journal of Economic History, 55 (1), March, 58–97
15. Petra Moser (2005), ‘How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs’, American Economic Review, 95 (4), September, 1214–36
16. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, and Dhanoos Sutthiphisal, (2013), ‘Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in U.S. History’, Business History Review, 87 (1), Spring, 3–38

Index

More information with the publisher