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"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"--
List of contents
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.
About the author
Oren Bracha is a professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, Austin. He is one of the leading scholars of the history of Anglo-American intellectual property and has published extensively in the fields of intellectual property law and legal history.
Summary
Owning Ideas explores the history of the emergence of intellectual property in the United States during the nineteenth century, examining the fields of both patent and copyright. It will appeal to readers interested in the concept of ideas as private property, and how it holds a dominant position in modern economic and cultural life.
