Marconi’s legal battles: Discursive, textual, and material entanglements

The paper offers an account of how the meaning of the concept of “invention” and “inventorship” is not stable and predefined but rather constructed during patent disputes. In particular, I look at how that construction takes place in adversarial settings like the courts of law. I argue that key notions of intellectual property law like invention and inventorship are as constructed as technoscientific claims are in laboratories. Courts should thus be seen as sites of construction through processes framed by specific discursive and evidentiary technologies like bureaucratic paperwork, literary technologies, historiographic accounts of inventorship, and models of artifacts and devices. I draw my examples from the British disputes of the Marconi Company concerning the patenting of wireless telegraph and radio communication technologies in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper tracks Marconi’s circulation of publications, models, historical reconstruction of inventions, and expert witnessing. It unravels the material, discursive, textual, and evidentiary constructions of legality.

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Fixing Improvisation

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195370935.013.015 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Anthea Kraut

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

Intellectual Property ◽

Case Studies ◽

Property Law ◽

Intellectual Property Law ◽

Tap Dance ◽

American Vernacular ◽

The Relationship

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.

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Hunting Pirates in Beiping

Pirates and Publishers ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691171821.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 211-251

Author(s):

Fei-Hsien Wang

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Intellectual Property ◽

Police Force ◽

Capital City ◽

Property Law ◽

Intellectual Property Law ◽

Gray Area ◽

Local Police ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Set Up

This chapter provides a background on how the Shanghai shuye gongsuo (SBG) set up an unusual private police force to combat piracy. Throughout the 1930s, the SBG's Beiping Office of the Piracy Investigation Committee, abbreviated as the Detective Branch, hunted down pirates in the old capital and beyond. Even though these would-be law enforcers had no legal jurisdiction over such matters, the Detective Branch staff tirelessly pursued those who violated the SBG members' copyright and punished them with their own means. The Detective Branch's antipiracy operation in Beiping constitutes in itself a unique story, but its real significance lies in the possibility it opens up in understanding detection, enforcement, and negotiation that mediated the intellectual property law and its effect in early twentieth-century China, when different conceptions and practices of copyright grew intertwined. Operating in the gray area between legality and illegality, the staff of the Detective Branch inspected bookshops in the old capital city and surrounding market towns. They launched raids, partnering with local police, to crack down on piracy and, sometimes, resorted to criminal activities themselves, such as fraud, bribery, or home intrusion, to ensure their success.

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