Figures of Invention: A History of Modern Patent Law

Journal article

1 online resource

9780191807282 eBook

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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010

English