The Global Rise of Patent Expertise During the Late Nineteenth Century

Pretel, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75450-5_6

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Yet, scholarship on intellectual property has not engaged consistently with the body of research Ben Kafka (2009) refers to as 'paperwork', the many gestures by which files, records and paper are mobilized to govern, oversee and control the basic infrastructures of information, knowledge and media (Gitelman, 2014;Riles, 2006). In my exploration of the enveloppe Soleau I hope to show the productiveness of paperwork perspectives in the context of intellectual property, adding to studies that have looked at the bureaucratic poetics of trademarks (Bellido and Kang, 2016); the expertise of patent examiners (Pretel, 2018;Swanson, 2009); the classification of patents (Kang, 2012); or the Patent Office as a centre of documentation (Hemmungs Wirtén, 2019). Suzanne Briet's (1951: 7) classic definition of a document as 'any source of information, in material form, capable of being used for reference or study or as an authority' can in the case of the enveloppe be further qualified to mean the mediating qualities of a 'bureaucratic document' (Hull, 2012: 253), one that is made by the office but is also of the office.…”

Section: Technologies Of Paper and Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wirtén

2021

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 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 Eugène 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.

show abstract