Patents; sources of scientific information? Patent law is often thought of as a way of stimulating innovation and encouraging companies to develop new products that boost the economy and raise our standard of living. We spoke to Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirtén about her work in investigating the patent system and its role in creating the information infrastructure that shapes our lives today. The granting of a patent gives an individual or company a degree of commercial control over a new invention, in return for disclosing information about the nature of the product. This is often thought of as a way of stimulating invention and encouraging companies to invest in new ideas, yet it has also been argued that they in fact hold back innovation, and there are historical examples of countries removing patent protections. “In 1869 for example the Netherlands abolished patents, while Switzerland did not have patent protections during some parts of the 19th century,” explains Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University in Sweden. Debate around patents continues today, intensified by concerns about unequal access to vaccines against Covid-19. Patents have typically been granted under national law, and countries may vary in terms of the specific requirements that need to be met. However, the critical factor is that a new product should be novel, often building on scientific
discoveries and cutting-edge research. “This is one of the baseline aspects of patents which connects it to scientific research,” stresses Professor Hemmungs Wirtén. Proving that an invention is new takes place through searches of what is called prior art, which includes material in journals and various other types of documents. “An enormous amount of material needs to be looked at in order to prove that an invention is new,” she continues. “With the development of evermore complex technical innovations, and the process of documenting it and proving it, the patent system becomes almost a motor of the information system.” This, however, is not a completely new development.
PASSIM Project Professor Hemmungs Wirtén is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Patents as Scientific Information 1895-2020 (PASSIM) project, which is a humanities-based, interdisciplinary project looking at the ascent and development of patents as documents during the twentieth-century. What makes
the project unique, she argues, is that its researchers look at patents from a much broader perspective than is usually the case. “Our interdisciplinary team looks at patents with fresh eyes, trying to understand their value and impact as part of the history of information and knowledge,” she outlines. The project is focused on the history of patents between 1895-2020, with researchers studying patents over this long historical period when information really came to the fore as a key component of modern society. This was paralleled by rapid technological development which opened up new possibilities in the communication of ideas and knowledge. “There were the beginnings of a new structure for the circulation of knowledge and information in the late 19th century, and patents played a role in that,” says Professor Hemmungs Wirtén. The history of patents pre-dates this period by several centuries, but as the processes of industrialization and internationalization gathered pace, the history of patents entered into a new phase.
”Laboratorium Mundaneum” - the visualization of patents among other documents made by Paul Otlet in 1937.
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