@article{47943,
      recid = {47943},
      author = {Pottage, Alain, and Sherman, Brad,},
      title = {Figures of Invention: A History of Modern Patent Law},
      pages = {1 online resource},
      abstract = {Taking the invention as its object of study, this book  develops a new perspective on the making of modern patent  law. Focusing on the figures that make inventions material,  and on how to overcome the intangibility of ideas, it makes  explicit a dimension of patent law that is not commonly  found in traditional commentaries, treatises, and cases.  The story is told from the perspective of the material  media in which the intangible form of the invention is made  visible; namely, models, texts, drawings, and biological  specimens. This brings to light some essential formative  moments in the history of patent law. The book describes  the central role that scale models played in the making of  nineteenth-century patent jurisprudence, the largely  mythical character of the nineteenth-century theory that  patents texts should function as a means of disclosing  inventions, and the profound conceptual changes that  emerged from debates as to how to represent and disclose  the first biological inventions. It also reveals the basic  conceptual architecture of modern patent law. The story of  how inventions were represented is also the story of the  formation of the modern concept of invention, or of the  historical processes that shaped the terms in which patent  lawyers still apprehend the intangible form of the  invention. Although the analysis focuses on the history of  patent law in the United States, it develops themes that  illuminate the evolution of patent regimes in Europe.},
      url = {http://tind.wipo.int/record/47943},
}