TIME-MBE and the TECHNIS research group are pleased to invite you to a free webinar. Join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 17th of October 2017 at 11:00 London time (12:00 Amsterdam time, 13:00 Athens time). The speaker is Stathis Arapostathis, NKUA Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

The title of the talk is “Tracking invention in the courts: Discursive, textual, and material entanglements in Marconi’s legal battles”.

Abstract: The paper offers an account of how the meaning of the concept of “invention” and “inventorship” is not stable and predefined but rather constructed during patent disputes. In particular, I look at how that construction takes place in adversarial settings like the courts of law. I argue that key notions of intellectual property law like invention and inventorship are as constructed as technoscientific claims are in laboratories. Courts should thus be seen as sites of construction through processes framed by specific discursive and evidentiary technologies like bureaucratic paperwork, literary technologies, historiographic accounts of inventorship, as well as models of artifacts and devices. I draw my examples from the British and US disputes of the Marconi Company concerning the patenting of wireless telegraph and radio communication technologies in the first half of the 20th century. The paper tracks Marconi’s circulation of publications, models, historical reconstruction of inventions, and expert witnessing. It unravels the material, discursive, textual and evidentiary constructions of legality.