Owning Ideas
The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909
Published on 1. December 2016
Book
Hardback
331 pages
978-0-521-87766-4 (ISBN)
Description
Owning Ideas is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the concept of intellectual property in the United States during the long nineteenth century. In the modern information era, intellectual property has become a central economic and cultural phenomenon, and an important lever for allocating wealth and power. This book uncovers the intellectual origins of this modern concept of private property in ideas through a close study of its emergence within the two most important areas of this field: patent and copyright. By placing the development of legal concepts within their social context, this study reconstructs the radical transformation of the idea. Our modern notion of owning ideas, it argues, came into being when the ideals of eighteenth-century possessive individualism at the heart of early patent and copyright were subjected to the forces and ideology of late-nineteenth-century corporate liberalism.
Reviews / Votes
'This book is a superb study of the transformation of American copyright and patent doctrine in the nineteenth century. Deeply researched, finely nuanced and lucidly presented. Owning Ideas will be read by literary scholars, cultural historians, Americanists generally and scholars in communications and media departments as well as by legal scholars. It will quickly become a classic.' Mark Rose, University of California, Santa Barbara 'Building on the foundation established by Rose and Deazley in their histories of the invention of copyright in the eighteenth century, Bracha's brilliant intellectual history explains how the fundamental components of patents and copyright - authorship, the object of protection and scope of protection - were transformed over the nineteenth century. With amazing analytical clarity, as well as wonderful depth, Owning Ideas is the first sophisticated account of the development of the constitutive assumptions of modern American intellectual property law.' Lionel Bently, University of CambridgeMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
636 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-87766-4 (9780521877664)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2019
Cambridge University Press
€49.40
Shipment within 15-20 days
E-Book
12/2016
Cambridge University Press
€21.99
Available for download
E-Book
11/2016
Cambridge University Press
€51.99
Available for download
Person
Oren Bracha is a professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, Austin. He is one of the leading scholars of the history of Anglo-American intellectual property and has published extensively in the fields of intellectual property law and legal history.
Content
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The origins of the American intellectual property regime; 2. The rise and fall of authorship based copyright; 3. Objects of property: owning intellectual works; 4. Inventors' rights; 5. Owning inventions; Conclusion; Index.