Alain Pottage and Brad Sherman
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199595631
- eISBN:
- 9780191807282
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199595631.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Intellectual Property, IT, and Media Law
This book charts the emergence of the conception of the invention in modern patent law, focusing on the material media in which the intangible form of the invention is made visible in legal settings. ...
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This book charts the emergence of the conception of the invention in modern patent law, focusing on the material media in which the intangible form of the invention is made visible in legal settings. It presents an alternative conceptual history of modern patent law in which the central actors are the media that make the intangible form of the invention visible and tractable, such as scale models, texts, botanical types, and deposits of living material. It also explores historical developments that settled the conditions in which the distinction between idea and embodiment became an unquestioned premise of patent doctrine. In addition, the book outlines a set of representational practices that are essential to the functioning of patent jurisprudence but not noticed or explained by patent doctrine. It suggests that the invention in its modern sense emerged in the course of the eighteenth century, when lawyers and administrators began systematically to make the distinction between ideas and embodiments, or between the invention and the material artefact in which it was expressed.Less
This book charts the emergence of the conception of the invention in modern patent law, focusing on the material media in which the intangible form of the invention is made visible in legal settings. It presents an alternative conceptual history of modern patent law in which the central actors are the media that make the intangible form of the invention visible and tractable, such as scale models, texts, botanical types, and deposits of living material. It also explores historical developments that settled the conditions in which the distinction between idea and embodiment became an unquestioned premise of patent doctrine. In addition, the book outlines a set of representational practices that are essential to the functioning of patent jurisprudence but not noticed or explained by patent doctrine. It suggests that the invention in its modern sense emerged in the course of the eighteenth century, when lawyers and administrators began systematically to make the distinction between ideas and embodiments, or between the invention and the material artefact in which it was expressed.
