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conclusion Attribution, Authenticity, & the Corporate Production of Technology and Culture The growth of corporations and the rapid spread of office and factory work significantly changed the application of legal rules regarding intellectual property ownership. As is always the case with law, the changing applications ultimately changed the rules themselves. As the settings in which ideas were manufactured became more “corporate”—more bureaucratic, more collective , and, quite literally, under the aegis of corporations—and as the claimants to idea ownership increasingly were corporations, what judges thought of idea ownership and how firms managed creative employees changed too. Judges came to believe that people learned workplace skills in large offices and factories rather than as apprentices in small workshops or as clerks in small offices. At the same time, judges developed a view of contract law generally, and the employment contract specifically, that operated both as a conceptual technology and as a mechanism of social control to enable a shift in idea ownership. The old legal conception of individual invention (and, therefore, individual ownership) seemed anachronistic. The acceptance of corporations as legal “persons” with all the rights and privileges of personhood provided a new legal framework to reconcile the traditionally individualist presuppositions of patent and copyright law, which focus on the author or the inventor, with the new social reality of collective innovation . The cultural change and the legal change coincided and reinforced one another in ways that naturalized the radical developments and made a revolution seem normal, inevitable, and uncontroversial. The Dependent Corporate Engineer and the Modern Middle Class By the third decade of the twentieth century, creative and educated people of scientific or technical skill who worked in business rather than academia had [241] Conclusion become employees of a big corporation in the middle layers of a large bureaucracy . For the most part, they no longer had either the option or the obligation to parlay their scientific knowledge and business acumen (if they had any) into a successful business venture; they could count on their positions as respected researchers at prestigious corporations and their stable corporate salaries for their social status. They enjoyed some measure of security, but not the kind of power or the opportunity for tremendous financial gain that the lucky and enterprising inventor had enjoyed fifty years before. The triumph of the mid-twentieth-century employment contract was to elevate inventive workers to a position of safe dependence amid the prosperity and job security that characterized white-collar male employment at the major American manufacturing firms. What had been risky became safe. The erratic but brilliant hero-inventor yielded his place to the competent, diligent , slightly dull, consumer-oriented 1950s company man. Companies like Kodak and Du Pont became exemplars of midcentury corporate technology giants: large, risk-averse, and generally not the place for an entrepreneurial young scientist or engineer to make a major breakthrough. There were dramatic inventions—vinyl, nylon—but they were corporate feats, not the achievements that created an individual legend like Bell’s or Edison’s. Decades later, looking back over the course of the twentieth-century transformation of invention from a world of entrepreneurship to a world of stable corporate employment, judges expressed both anxiety about whether corporate research sufficiently promoted individual ingenuity and nostalgia for an imagined past in which great inventors could become great leaders. As the New Jersey Supreme Court noted in one of the leading cases on preinvention assignment agreements, Ingersoll-Rand v. Ciavatta (1989), there is a “dichotomy of our views on the rights of an inventor and rights of an employer .” The court expressed concern that employer control over inventions was fueling an alleged decline in patenting by Americans. Justice Garibaldi’s opinion for a unanimous court contrasted a stagnant America with the thenascendant Japan, noting that Japan had “witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of inventions generated by employed inventors” after the adoption of a 1959 law that tied employed inventors’ compensation to the market value of their inventions. The story behind the case justifies the court’s wistful view about the loss of the entrepreneurial spirit at major American manufacturing firms and the dependence of inventors on corporate employment.1 A New Jersey company founded in 1871 by a number of inventor-entrepreneurs who parlayed their inventions and business acumen into a successful firm based on new technology using compressed air, Ingersoll-Rand eventually became a large, diversified manufacturer of heavy equipment, [3.144.124.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 08:30 GMT...

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