Recollection and Possession
Alain Pottage, Brad Sherman · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2010
This chapter examines the link between recollection and possession as they apply to invention. It discusses the shift from craftsmanship to manufacture, the emergence of the figure of the industrial copy, and the commodification of what Karl Marx called intellectual potentiality. It considers the premise that inventive ideas as understood by emerging patent regimes were historical effects rather than natural entities and suggests that the process of constituting the inventive idea as a thing — a prerequisite for the emergence of the invention — was accomplished in the practical, material form of the patent specification, rather than through normative or conceptual argument. It also explores how the ideology of manufacture facilitated the emergence of the modern form of the invention by making knowledge visible as a commodity. Finally, the chapter describes the jurisprudential theory of disclosure in patent law.