Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property

de Graham Dutfield, Stathis Arapostathis

'Arapostathis and Dutfield's rich and well-edited collection offers a cogent challenge to patent-centred views of innovation. Their seventeen authors persuasively show that patenting is just one of a repertoire of tools successfully used to protect innovative work in a broad variety of context-dependent ways. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn about past contingencies in the transformation of techno-scientific creativity into wealth.' - Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds, UK. 'Essential reading, not just for IP historians and lawyers, but for anyone concerned at the insidious corporate take-over of modern life. It explodes the fallacy that patent systems exist to safeguard inventors' interests: the 20th Century saw inventors become salaried corporate employees, universities adopt a model of academic entrepreneurship, and IPRs create their own, increasingly global, logic.^ Yet, from Left and Right now arise fundamental ethical questions: isn't intellectual property just legal chicanery; shouldn't knowledge be a universal, public good?' - Christine MacLeod, University of Bristol, UK. This diverse and insightful volume investigates changing patterns of knowledge management practices and intellectual property regimes across a range of different techno-scientific disciplines and cultures. The book links the practices and regimes of the past with those of contemporary and emerging forms, covering the mid-19th century to the present. The contributors are noted scholars from various disciplines including history of science and technology, intellectual property law, and innovation studies.^ The chapters offer original perspectives on how proprietary regimes in knowledge production processes have developed as a socio-political phenomenon of modernity, as well as providing an analysis of the way individuals, institutions and techno-sciences interact within this culture. With in-depth analysis, this book will appeal to academics and students of STS (Science, Technology and Society), history of science and technology, business history, innovation studies, law, science and technology policy as well as business studies. Historians of science and technology and business will also find much to interest them in this book.