Owning ideas : the intellectual origins of American intellectual property, 1790-1909 / Oren Bracha.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bracha, Oren, author.

Series:

Cambridge historical studies in American law and society.

Cambridge historical studies in American law and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Intellectual property--United States--History.

Intellectual property.

Copyright--United States--History.

Copyright.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 324 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 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.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 31 Jan 2017).

ISBN:

1-316-86314-X

1-316-87616-0

1-316-87625-X

0-511-84323-2

1-316-87634-9

1-316-87643-8

1-316-87670-5