The Origins of the American Intellectual Property Regime

Our 19th Century Patent System

“…Initially, it appeared that American patents would follow their English, colonial, and state predecessors as "discretionary ad hoc grants" by the crown or the legislature, issued on a case-bycase basis and differing in their terms, conditions, and duration. 23 The First Congress received petitions from inventors, assuming an ad hoc approach, for exclusive rights in their inventions. 24 Both the House and the Senate appointed committees to review these petitions, which in some instances recommended passing special bills to grant exclusive rights to the inventors based on a case-by-case evaluation of the desirability of patent protection.…”

“Great Men,” Law, and the Social Construction of Technology

“…Largely ignored by legal historians, the history of patents has been the domain of economic historians, who seek to measure change in innovation over time, and historians of technology, who have used patents in multiple ways to pursue their project of explaining the process of technological change 11 . To the extent that the history of patent law has been written, it has been largely as intellectual history, tracing doctrinal developments and, in particular, the shift from privilege to property right and the emergence of the idea of individual invention (Bugbee, 1967; Sherman and Bentley, 1999; Mossoff, 2001; Pottage and Sherman, 2010; Bottomley, 2014; Bracha, 2016). 12 Arapostathis, Gooday, and Beauchamp are each trained historians who have placed law front and center in their investigations of the history of invention and technological development, and in so doing, developed nuanced, contextualized social histories of patents and patent law in the late-nineteenth-century United Kingdom and United States.…”

“… 19 The historical work on which these scholars rely includes Noble (1977), Reich (1985), and Fisk (1998). For other scholarship on this transition in business and technology, see Housenshell (1996) and Carlson (1997), and in law, emphasizing both the persistence and evolution of the individual inventor, see Bracha (2016). …”

Invenciones institucionales: el sistema de patentes en las colonias españolas durante el siglo XIX

“…Desde época temprana encontramos ejemplos de concesiones de patentes de invención en colonias francesas, inglesas y españolas. Desde comienzos del siglo las colonias inglesas en América del norte empezaron a conceder monopolios de patente de forma discrecional (Bently, 2011;Bracha, 2016). Las entonces colonias de Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nueva York, Virginia, Carolina del Sur y Plymouth concedieron patentes de invención, sobre todo a invenciones agrícolas, como recoge el catálogo de patentes elaborado por el prestigioso abogado londinense Bennet Woodcroft (1969).…”