New from Cambridge University Press:
Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790–1909, by
Oren Bracha (University of Texas, Austin). A description from the Press:
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.
Advance praise:
"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
"Building on the foundation established by Rose and Deazley in
their histories of the invention of copyright in the 18th century,
Bracha’s brilliant intellectual history explains how the fundamental
components of parents and copyright - authorship, object of protection
and scope - were transformed over the 19th 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
More information is available
here.
