CIPIL Intellectual Property Seminar Series 2011-12: 'The specification requirement and the diffusion of technology during the eighteenth century'

Speaker: Sean Bottomley, Ph.D candidate in History, University of Cambridge.

Room B16, Faculty of Law 1pm Thursday 17 May 2012 - a sandwich lunch will be provided for those attending the talk.

This paper will examine the development of the specification requirement from its introduction in the 1710s to the end of the eighteenth century. The current 'orthodox' view is that the specification was introduced to help the law officers discriminate between ostensibly similar inventions. Not until Lord Mansfield's decision in Liardet v Johnson (1778) did the specification transmute from an administrative arbiter into the consideration on which the patent was awarded. In this new conceptualisation, the patent was regarded as representing a contract between the inventor and the public. In return for revealing their invention via the written specification the inventor was awarded their patent. Consequently, considerable emphasis was placed on the sufficiency of the description contained in the specification. Using new evidence from the records of the law officers and contemporary law reports this paper argues that this contractual view of the patent had antecedents from the 1730s. In particular, the sufficiency of the specification was a consideration in law long before Liardet v Johnson.

The second half of the paper discusses some of the ramifications of the early development of the specification requirement. It has been argued by Christine MacLeod that the majority of specifications entered during the eighteenth century were intentionally obfuscatory and, due to the poverty of the administrative arrangements made by the Chancery offices where they were kept, rendered inaccessible to the public. Even by the standards of the day, however, it would be strange that such emphasis was placed on the sufficiency of the specification but once entered virtually withheld from the public. Instead the paper argues, contrary to MacLeod, that these specifications were available to the public, regularly consulted, and that many were published in contemporary scientific and mechanical journals. It also argues that the enforcement of the specification requirement worked as it was intended – to oblige inventors to enter accurate and useful descriptions of their patented inventions.