Ghosts of inventions: Patent law’s digital mediations

Abstract

This article examines the shifts in the material ordering of inventions in patent law organization and their effects on the meaning and scope of inventions as intellectual property. Formats and media are constitutive of the establishment and stabilization of inventions as objects of intellectual property. Modern patent law’s materiality had been dominated by paper documents but ever more consists of digital images, files, and networked data. The article traces and analyzes such effects of digital media on the meaning of intellectual/intangible property and argues that inventions increasingly matter as digital data in the legal realm.