Past Historic 8: Charles Dickens and 'The Poor Man's Tale of a Patent'

The eighth item in the little bundle of photocopied pieces on IP history which this Kat researched and wrote back in the 1980s, when he was still a full-time academic, is by far the longest and is very much one of his favourites. It's an annotated version of a short story, 'A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent', the sad story of a provincial inventor who set off for London in order to obtain a patent, only to cover that the patent application process was an expensive and frustrating one which took all of ... six weeks.

Charles Dickens' interest in intellectual property is best known with respect to his campaign for adequate copyright protection for authors whose works were not first published in the United States and which could therefore be reproduced and recited there with impunity. Indeed, in Dickens' day, the United States when viewed from the perspective of European authors was not unlike the internet today -- a vast, relatively ungovernable region in which the regular rules of intellectual property either did not apply or could not easily be enforced. One wonders what choice words Dickens would have had for the Google Book project, had he been alive today.

You can access this Dickens' tale, together with this Kat's introduction and annotations, which was originally published as a slender monograph by ESC Publishing Ltd -- another name from the grand past of intellectual property -- here.