The Patent and the Paper : a Few Thoughts on Late Modern Science and Intellectual Property

Marie and Pierre Curie’s decision not to patent the discovery (1898) and later isolation (1902) of radium is perhaps the most famous of all disinterested decisions in the history of science. To choose publishing instead of patenting and openness instead of enclosure was hardly a radical choice at the time. Traditionally, we associate academic publishing with “pure science” and Mertonian ideals of openness, sharing and transparency. Patenting on the other hand, as a byproduct of “applied science” is intimately linked to an increased emphasis and dependency on commercialization and technology transfer within academia. Starting from the Curies’ mythological decision I delineate the contours of an increasing convergence of the patent and the paper (article) from the end of the nineteenth-century until today. Ultimately, my goal is to suggest a few possible ways of addressing the hybrid space that today constitute the terrain of late modern science and intellectual property. - See more at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1573600#sthash.zbZHFZXG.dpu

När rätt blir fel : om upphovsrätt, kreativitet och kulturpolitik

Upphovsrätten är en av samtidens verkligt stora kulturpolitiskt relevanta (och kontroversiella) frågor. Piratbyrån och anti-Piratbyrån slåss om tolkningsföreträdet i media och i rapporter som Creative Economy 2008 ägnar FN stort utrymme åt kopplingarna mellan kulturens ekonomiska och symboliska värde och intellektuell egendom (intellectual property rights) och betonar särskilt vikten av genomtänkta policyperspektiv. Genom att diskutera upphovsrättens strukturella betydelse i ett genomglobaliserat och digitaliserat samhälle, där kultur blivit på samma gång både mer lättillgänglig och allt mer kontrollerad, är ambitionen med detta bidrag att lyfta fram några av de aspekter som motiverar ett ökat kulturpolitiskt engagemang kring upphovsrätten

How Patents Became Documents, or Dreaming of Technoscientific Order, 1895-1937

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show how the documentation movement associated with the utopian thinkers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine relied on patent offices as well as the documents most closely associated with this institutional setting – the patents themselves – as central to the formation of the document category. The main argument is that patents not only were subjected to and helped construct, but also in fact engineered the development of technoscientific order during 1895–1937. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual property, document theory and insights from media archeology. Focused on the historical period 1895–1937, this study allows for an analysis that encapsulates and accounts for change in a number of comparative areas, moving from bibliography to documentation and from scientific to technoscientific order. Primary sources include Paul Otlet’s own writings, relevant contemporary sources from the French documentation movement and the Congrès Mondial de la documentation universelle in 1937. Findings By understanding patent offices and patents as main drivers behind those processes of sorting and classification that constitute technoscientific order, this explorative paper provides a new analytical framework for the study of intellectual property in relation to the history of information and documentation. It argues that the idea of the document may serve to rethink the role of the patent in technoscience, offering suggestions for new and underexplored venues of research in the nexus of several overlapping research fields, from law to information studies. Originality/value Debates over the legitimacy and rationale of intellectual property have raged for many years without signs of abating. Universities, research centers, policy makers, editors and scholars, research funders, governments, libraries and archives all have things to say on the legitimacy of the patent system, its relation to innovation and the appropriate role of intellectual property in research and science, milieus that are of central importance in the knowledge-based economy. The value of this paper lies in proposing a new way to approach patents that could show a way out of the current analytical gridlock of either/or that for many years has earmarked the “openness-enclosure” dichotomy. The combination of intellectual property scholarship and documentation theory provides important new insight into the historical networks and processes by which patents and documents have consolidated and converged during the twentieth century

In the service of secrecy : An enveloped history of priority, proof and patents

This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from LInstitut national de la propriete industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of euro15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugene Soleau (1852-1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.Funding: European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme European Research Council (ERC) [741095-PASSIM-ERC-2016-AdG]</p

Patents of Persuasion : Tempo-metrics and the Shaping of Knowledge About Knowledge

PASSI

Colonial Copyright, Postcolonial Publics : the Berne Convention and the 1967 Stockholm Diplomatic Conference Revisited

Språken, skolan, samhället 1960-201

"They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere": Looking for the "Global" Book

Abstract: At the brink of a new millennium, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. has grown into an international publishing phenomenon, publishing in more than twenty languages on six continents and in more than a hundred markets around the world -- a long way from what began as a modest Canadian reprint operation in 1949. Concerned with the way in which the ``global'' becomes the ``local,'' this article uses Harlequin's Stockholm office as a case study for a closer look at just how Harlequin romances are transposed from one cultural context into another. By arguing that translation and editing are local strategies with considerable power in changing the text as well as its production and consumption, this paper focuses on the way in which the Harlequin book, through the combined process of editing and translation -- what I have termed transediting, is given a ``Swedish'' identity. Résumé: A la veille d'un nouveau millénaire, les Entreprises Harlequin Limitées sont devenues un phénomène international dans l'édition, publiant en plus de vingt langues sur six continents et dans plus d'une centaine de marchés autour du monde -- une longue distance de ce qui avait été au départ une modeste opération canadienne pour les réimpressions en 1949. Concerné par le moyen dont le "global" devient le "local", cet article utilise les bureaux d'Harlequin à Stockholm comme étude de cas pour porter un regard plus attentif sur la manière dont on transpose les romans Harlequin d'un contexte culturel à un autre. En soutenant que la traduction et la correction sont des stratégies locales avec un pouvoir considérable pour changer le texte autant que sa production et sa consommation, cet article se penche sur la façon dont le livre Harlequin reçoit une identité `suédoiseé, au moyen de la traduction et de la correction -- ce que j'ai appelé "transediting" (la "traducorrection")

Cosmopolitan Copyright : Law and Language in the Translation Zone

Languages, Education and Swedish Society 1960-201