Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930
Catherine L. Fisk
Abstract
Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their “property,” or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. This book chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial ... More
Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their “property,” or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. This book chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, this book argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies—including DuPont, Rand Mc-Nally, and the American Tobacco Company—the book addresses scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.
Keywords:
intellectual property,
economic democracy,
DuPont,
Rand Mc-Nally,
American Tobacco Company,
technology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780807833025 |
| Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: July 2014 |
DOI:10.5149/9780807899069_fisk |
