Rethinking Patent Cultures

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Patenting has become widespread in many countries and different areas of life since the industrial revolution, and especially since the rise of international businesses in the late nineteenth century. For example, between 1990 and 2003 the number of U.S. patents more than doubled from about 80,000 to 169,000 per year, and the increase is particularly significant in the biological sciences. However, while this high level of global activity has typically led scholars to assume that patenting has become simply one global phenomenon, it is clear from Gooday's recent research that patenting activity and attitudes towards it has varied between country, by industry and by community.But how should we intepret this strikingly complex phenomenon? Has patenting been a natural and straightforward solution to problems of protecting innovation across many different areas in all countries? Evidently not, since many other kinds of intellectual property management ranging from trade secrecy to open knowledge sharing have also thrived over the last century. Moreover, not every country has embraced patent laws as a prerequisite of innovation - especially in Asian societies where ordinary individuals may not be able to own or monopolize creative ideas. Then again, where patent cultures have spread in industrial societies, it has sometimes been controversial: many countries long prohibited the patenting of medical products in order to maximize public access to healthcare. Strikingly, when patents have been taken up, it has not always been large businesses but sometimes by minority groups seek to protect their technological needs, most notably disabled people. So there is much scope for re-mapping the factors affecting who patents what and why - or indeed why not. This research network proposes to explore the late nineteenth and twentieth century development of this phenomenon at a global level and on a national and local scale. It seeks to explore the subtleties of patenting activity within different countries and the economic, social and technological explanation for the development of particular attitudes towards patenting in these countries. The obvious current significance of patenting activity within biomedicine and bodily diversity in particular requires explanation; and accordingly the network will latterly focus on the history of patenting cultures in medicine and for disability appliances. The project therefore seeks to analyse the roles played by government, industry, lawyers, inventors and scientists in innovation and patenting activity and the relationships between them. The network is particularly interested in the ways in which users of medical tools, pharmaceuticals, devices and appliances designed to assist those with disabilities shaped innovation and whether patents provided them with a method of subverting industry norms during the expansion of global capitalism. In addition to historians, this diverse range of stakeholders will therefore form a vital part of the network and will actively contribute to and shape the three planned workshops.Three workshops will be held on each of the key areas and accompanying edited volumes (inter alia) produced as the main academic output. The first will focus on national locality and will examine different patenting cultures across the world; the second will examine patenting within medicine and will look at the relationship between patents, medical practitioners, scientists, industry and users; the third will concentrate on appliances for people with disabilities to examine the ways in which patents were used by inventors and users. To ensure full public engagement this network's workshops will include representatives of business, healthcare, law and disability, with full social media reporting of project activities and outcomes, allied to public lectures and exhibits. Moreover, each of the project workshops will have a public event associated with it to maximize impact.