First Annual ISHTIP Workshop - Università Bocconi

This workshop will explore the making of intellectual property, understood broadly as the myriad legal and non-legal processes by which individuals and groups are credited with, and rewarded for, the authorship of intangible creations, while others are condemned or penalised for using or claiming such creations as their own.

While most contemporary discussion focuses on the legal regimes of copyright, patent and trade mark (and corresponding legal wrongs of piracy and counterfeiting), the premise of this workshop is that these constitute only some of the many ways in which 'creations' are identified, and entitlements relating to such creations are recognised or generated.  For example, groups from chefs to magicians regulate the creative activities of their members through bodies of customs and less formalised norms, while other institutions and groups (from universities, to the Church and to medical associations) offer their own systems of sanctions against those who are considered to have made use of intangible material in an 'inappropriate' manner.  Equally, specific traditions have developed for attributing authorship of publications and inventions amongst scientific researchers, while astronomers, meteorologists and botanists confer rights to name particular phenomena on those who are viewed as having 'discovered' them.

What is the source of these diverse mechanisms? How is it that some intellectual artefacts have come to be identified, abstracted from their material reality, mapped and their authorship attributed to particular individuals or groups whereas others circulate socially without such attribution? To what extent are the processes by which ideas and information are transformed into discrete ontological entities historically specific? What, precisely, are the social and other conditions that render such processes possible? Why have different intangible artefacts been treated in different ways? And how have they operated historically to facilitate, or impede, intellectual production and exchange? How have legal and non-legal intellectual properties interacted? To what extent can the shape of contemporary legal intellectual properties be explained by reference to social norms (either as pre-cursors to formal laws, or as alternatives to and limitations upon such laws)?

By focusing on the heterogeneous roots of our present intellectual property regime the workshop aims to foster richer contextualization of this regime than can be provided by legal history working alone. To this end it will assemble scholars from across the disciplines from anthropology, economic and business history, the history of science, literary and cultural history, as well as from legal history and theory.

Contact us: ishtip@unibocconi.it