Intellectual Property, Piracy, and the Nature of Science, 1800-2000

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary Intellectual property, piracy, and the nature of science, 1800-2000 Objectives This study will explore the relationship between challenges to intellectual property and arguments about the nature of science over the last two centuries. It will explain how our notions of proper conduct in scientific research and communication have developed out of such conflicts. To that end, the study will focus on three topics that are related both thematically and chronologically. Together they form a coherent sequence extending from the industrial revolution to the digital age. The first topic is a remarkably sustained campaign against patents and copyrights that was waged from about1820 to the end of the nineteenth century. These generations saw the terms scientist and intellectual property come into common parlance for the first time. To an extent not hitherto appreciated, the two concepts were defined in tandem, through public debates on the proper nature, attribution, and reward of creativity. Engineers and scientists like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Huxley played prominent parts in these disputes. In consequence, the period established a field of possibility for scientific authorship itself: it fixed the grounds on which scientific and technical communication must in future be conducted. And at the same time, it also fixed the terms in which later conflicts about intellectual property (IP) would have to be fought. Those terms helped shape the early media industries, and have resurfaced in today's furor over digital piracy. The second topic addresses the period from the 1850s to the 1960s. The early years of this period saw the first of an ongoing series of international meetings designed to make intellectual property a universal right for the first time. Such ventures were part of a much broader innovation whereby governments held conferences to hammer out common issues in areas like trade, communication, metrology, hygiene, and science. By excavating the social history of the intellectual property congresses, the study will reconstruct how they sought to elevate IP to a new level of universality. At the same time as science too was experiencing a similar process, by similar means. But from the 1920s, philosophers and scientists alike became increasingly alarmed at the policies that the proponents of universal intellectual property advocated for science. The implications particularly worried those involved in forging a new account of science, technology, and society around the concept of information.. They sought to counter them by questioning the fundamental assumptions on which universalist policies rested. The study will explore how new accounts of science that appeared in the 1930s-50s were shaped partly as responses to this problem. It will reveal how property and piracy were integrated into the scientific culture of information. The third and final topic spans the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This part of the study will concentrate on the vexed issue of biopiracy. It will trace the arguments over IP and piracy in the biosciences back to those international conferences of the late nineteenth century, and to the normative views of research advanced in the wake of WWII. It will show how industrial research in the life sciences came to be associated with overweening claims for intellectual authorship, as well as with free trade and colonialism. It will offer a new explanation of why the biopiracy debates are so bitter and intractable: they are laying bare fundamental problems of knowledge, communication, and authorship bequeathed by those earlier defining exchanges over science and intellectual property. Methods In order to recover how challenges to intellectual property and understandings of scientific creativity have affected each other, the approach will comprise a social-historical study that is at once sweeping and detailed. It will focus on both the principles at stake in past debates and the ways in which they reshaped mundane scientific practice. This project will use a far broader range of evidence than has hitherto been exploited in studies of intellectual property. The result will be a much richer contextualization of the scientific issues at stake than has previously been available. Intellectual Merit Although the literature on intellectual property is huge, there is no account currently available that deals with the relation between images of science and challenges to IP with anything like the attention that the primary sources warrant, nor with the questions and approach advocated here. Nor, more broadly, is there a history of creative piracy that does justice to its various forms, meanings, and influences. This project is unprecedented in all these respects. Broader Impacts The proposed research is part of a larger research project dedicated to the history of piracy since the Renaissance. Much of this larger project is already complete. Since piracy has become such a ubiquitous concern in our own day, the audience for this study is anticipated to be both large and diverse. Given this, its impact may well be substantial. This project aims to remedy a remarkable and consequential failing in public knowledge. It will provide the first account of a history fundamental to understanding the nature and fortunes of science in a context of globalization. At present, public arguments over scientific IP tend to be less fruitful than they should be, partly because of ignorance of the history involved. Revealing that what are now often assumed to be irreconcilable foes share a common past ought to enlighten the debate, and supply new intellectual tools for those seeking to mitigate its violence.