Invented by law
Subtitle: Alexander Graham Bell and the patent that changed America
By: Christopher Beauchamp
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780674368064
Subjects: Telecommunication; Patent laws and legislation; Law and legislation; Inventors; Patents; History
Description: Beauchamp reconstructs the world of nineteenth-century patent law, replete with inventors, capitalists, and charlatans, where rival claimants and political maneuvering loomed large in the contests that erupted over new technologies. He challenges the popular myth of Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers. More than anyone else, it was the courts that anointed Bell father of the telephone, granting him a patent monopoly that decisively shaped the American telecommunications industry for a century to come. Beauchamp investigates the sources of Bell’s legal primacy in the United States, and looks across the Atlantic, to Britain, to consider how another legal system handled the same technology in very different ways.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-260) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: 1. Invention in the lawyers' world; title: 2. Acts of invention; title: 3. The telephone case; title: 4. The United States versus Bell; title: 5. Atlantic crossings; title: 6. Patent the Earth; title: 7. Patents, firms, and systems; title: 8. Patents and the network nation; title: Conclusion.