[Commons-Law] rade Secrets: Intellectual Property and the Origins of American

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [bytesforall_readers] new book  --  Doron Ben-Atar, "Trade
Secrets: Intellectual Property and the Origins of American Industrial
Power" From:    "Darius Cuplinskas" <cuplinsk at OSI.HU>
Date:    Wed, March 24, 2004 10:54 pm
To:      "BytesForAll" <bytesforall_readers at yahoogroups.com>
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Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property and the Origins of American
Industrial Power
by Doron S. Ben-Atar

304 pages, Yale University Press (April 2004) ISBN: 030010006X (available
through booksellers such as Amazon - unfortunately only the $38 hardcover
is on offer at the moment; no parts of it seem to be available online)

Doron Ben-Atar is associate professor of history at Fordham University.

Book Description
During the first decades of America's existence as a nation, private
citizens, voluntary associations, and government officials encouraged the
smuggling of European inventions and artisans to the New World. At the
same time, the young republic was developing policies that set new
standards for protecting industrial innovations. This book traces the
evolution of America's contradictory approach to intellectual property
rights from the colonial period to the age of Jackson.

During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Britain shared
technological innovations selectively with its American colonies. It
became less willing to do so once America's fledgling industries grew more
competitive. After the Revolution, the leaders of the republic supported
the piracy of European technology in order to promote the economic
strength and political independence of the new nation. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, the United States became a leader among
industrializing nations and a major exporter of technology. It erased from
national memory its years of piracy and became the world's foremost
advocate of international laws regulating intellectual property.


---

"Ben-Atar tells the remarkable story of how the fledgling United States
used pirated technology to lay the foundation for its future industrial
might even as it grappled with the timeless question of who owns
knowledge, revealing a previously hidden face of the early republic. A
major
contribution to the field, 'Trade Secrets' should also be read by students
of modern intellectual property and international economic development."
-- Bruce H. Mann, University of Pennsylvania

"Doron Ben-Atar's elegant study moves from customary appreciations of the
Founding Fathers to the tough realities facing statesmen establishing a
viable republic, technologically and commercially backward. Ben-Atar
guides the reader through these thickets of intellectual thievery and
smuggling with aplomb and wit." -- Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of
History Emeritus, Yale University

"Using a comparative, transatlantic framework, 'Trade Secrets' provides a
lively, original, ironic analysis of the contradictory ways that early
national and state policy makers encouraged the innovation that propelled
America's industrial revolution."--Richard D. Brown is co-author of The
Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler

"Doron Ben-Atar's 'Trade Secrets' opens a fascinating, and hitherto
little-known, chapter in early American history: the importance of
‘technology piracy’ to national development. Taken as a whole, the book is
a remarkable fusion of intellectual, legal, political, economic, and
social history; considered page by page, it offers trenchant analysis
interspersed with lively narrative vignettes. And the issues it raises,
most especially those concerning intellectual property, have much currency
even
today."--John Demos, Yale University