Historians of science and technology and STS practitioners have always taken intellectual property very seriously but, with some notable exceptions, they have typically refrained from looking “into” it. There is mounting evidence, however, that they can open up the black box of IP as effectively as they have done for the technosciences, enriching their discipline while making significant contributions to legal studies. One approach is to look at the technologies through which patent law construes its object – the invention – (...) in specific settings and periods by examining procedures, classifications, archives, models, repositories, patent specifications (in both their linguistic and pictorial dimensions), and the highly specialized language of patent claims. More ambitiously, we could treat intellectual property as a technology itself. Patent law does not evolve either by merely articulating its doctrine in response to technological developments. The line between what does and does not count as invention may be redrawn with the emergence of new objects and technologies, but is not determined by them. It is this constructive feature of the law that we are trying to capture with the notion of law as technology. We hope that thinking about the technologies of the law and the law as technology will bring into question what we mean by both “technology” and “law”. (shrink)

This paper argues that the development of early-modern science was strongly influenced by prevailing legal practices.1 This argument goes back to the work of Barbara Shapiro, who explored in a numb...

It was because of the early modern system of invention privileges that questions concerning inventorship became a recurrent subject matter of legal dispute. This essay focuses mainly on the details of one such dispute, namely the 1597 case litigated in the Dutch Republic between Jacob Floris van Langren (ca. 1525–1610) and Jodocus Hondius Sr. (1563–1612). The essay assesses how the law shaped, challenged, and constrained claims to innovation, pushing the argument that it was because of the privilege system that the (...) borders between imitation and novelty became ever more clearly defined. The case study thus illustrates how the law functioned as a technology ordering a complex web of knowledge and status claims. (shrink)