I’d like to take that up as the topic of my post, through a look at the little-known legal life of the light bulb.

Thanks to Zetson for the CC-licensed image, via Flickr

More than a century after its introduction, the light bulb remains the defining icon of invention.

Justifiably so, in my opinion, because this widget almost single-handedly drove the demand for electrification. The light bulb was the killer app, if you will, for electric power. Which in turn enabled a whole new era of innovation.

But the story I want to tell is not one of great inventors and the inevitable march of progress. Hardly. It’s a story of legal battles, corporate strategy, social (in)justice, and lost technological opportunities.

Now as a girl, I was taught that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Full stop. That simple.

My fourth-grade class even took a field trip to Edison’s estate where, we were innocently led to believe, the Great Inventor single-handedly fathered the light bulb, the movie camera, and the phonograph (whatever that is).

Only very recently did I come to appreciate the much messier truth…

Edison’s team was merely one of dozens that co-invented electric light bulb. Scientifically speaking, his team’s discoveries were neither the first, nor the most important.

Image provided by the National Archives at www.ourdocuments.gov

What Edison did better than all the other inventors took place not in the laboratory, but in the office.

His lawyers pursued, obtained, asserted, and litigated key patents on light bulb technology in order to run competing bulb manufacturers out of business.

Edison then leveraged his monopoly on bulbs to corner the market in electricity service as well. And that was where he made the big bucks. Ever hear of GE?

Now the fourth-grade account suggests that we should thank Mr. Edison for bringing us this amazing technology. Without his long hours in the laboratory – he even slept there! – we would still be in the dark.

But when you look at the history more closely, Edison’s scientific contribution starts to look pretty dispensable.

Scientists had already published instructions for producing a glowing electric bulb in 1709. The technology was already commercially viable in 1876. A few years later, London’s Savoy Theatre switched from gas lighting to electric bulbs supplied by Joseph Swan.

It was at this point, in 1879, that Edison filed for his first patent on “an improvement in Electric Lamps and in the method of manufacturing the same.” The improvement Edison claimed was the use of a certain type of filament inside the bulb.

Now, a patent is just a claim to have invented something new and therefore, to own that technology as intellectual property. It’s not proof of inventorship. Moreover, patent filers often claim ownership of ideas much more broadly than the law and facts actually warrant.

For these reasons, competing companies often end up in court to determine exactly who owns what.

For example, Thomas Swan had light bulb patents of his own, the first predating Edison’s by 19 years. He had even been granted a patent in England claiming the same discovery Edison’s team claimed to have made. But he was unable to retain the legal upper hand.

Even though it was never legally established that Swan’s bulbs infringed on Edison’s patents, the shadow of IP law made it too risky for Swan to continue competing with Edison. The two companies merged.

In the process, competition in the light bulb market — and therefore the race to roll out improvements resulting in less-expensive, longer-lasting light — was severely curtailed. It would be half a century before ordinary Americans could afford electric lights.

For that to happen, it took not only the invalidation of key patents claims surrounding the light bulb, but also a bitterly contested political battle over the entry of federal and local governments into the business of electricity generation and supply.

The story of the light bulb reveals that the relationship between patents, innovation, and the spread of new technologies is more complex than is widely understood.

Companies who stand to benefit from longer, stronger patent protection would have us believe that patents promote innovation by providing greater incentives to invention. And there is good reason to believe that is at least sometimes the case.

But often, it works the other way. Patents are claimed by parties with no unique claim to invention, and used as weapons to stifle competition.

The result can be a paradoxical delay in scientific advancement, widespread access to new technologies, and opportunities for new businesses and opportunities that build upon that technology.

For an illustration, consider the biggest technological game-changer since electricity itself: the Internet.

photograph (c) alles-schlumpf, via Flickr

Where would we be today if Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee had sought patents on the World Wide Web in 1990, requiring anyone who wanted to provide a web-based service to negotiate a license with them?

Would we have smart phones, apps, and cloud computing today? Start ups? Google? Wikipedia? Internet memes? Even online shopping?

Almost certainly not. Software-based innovation moves so fast precisely because the Internet open, its underlying technology not controlled by any one company. It’s one area where IP law doesn’t get in the way of innovation.

Ensuring that access to new technologies spreads as rapidly as possible is an issue of distributive justice and, I argue, human rights.

But it’s also critical to economic growth. Each new technology paves the way for the next generation of business opportunities. When we slow their spread, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

For more on these ideas, check out my speech at the Yale ISP’s recent conference on Access to Knowledge and Human Rights or my article forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review entitled The Right to Science and Culture.

Download link: [OGG] [MP4]

The work combines footage from interviews with a number of entrepreneurs, activists, and scholars shot at last summer’s Open Video Conference, including: Yochai Benkler (ISP Affiliated Fellow), Shay David ISP Visiting Fellow), and Adi Kamdar (ISP Student Fellow), and Lea Shaver (Director, ISP Access to Knowledge Research Program).

The Open Video Alliance has the video online — available for download, in open format, subtitles coming soon — at http://openvideoalliance.org/why-open-video/?l=en.

These ideas are still taking shape, but it was great to be able to work them over with conference participants from civil society groups, law firms, and governments — participants who came from China, Thailand, India, Israel, Canada, and a host of other countries that have all dealt with online safe harbors in different ways. Many thanks to the organizers of the conference, to the Yale ISP and the Kauffman Foundation, and to the fine restaurants and street vendors in Beijing’s Haidian District.

Laura DeNardis presented a chapter of her current book project, Technologies of Dissent, in a panel on maps and images. Her paper, “Technologies of Dissent: The Use of Internet Mapping Technology in Political Protest,” examines the intersection of dissent and digital geography by exploring the recent arrest of a G20 protester broadcasting police movements via twitter, the Google maps mashup “Prop 8 Maps” containing geographical markers for individuals who had donated money in support of the passage of Proposition 8, and other examples. DeNardis’s paper explores the dissolution of boundaries between virtual and material realities of political dissent and how the possibly transformative roll of mapping technologies necessitates a reconceptualization of 21st century social action and of the technical architectures necessary to support political expression.

Stop by tomorrow at 4pm in WLH room 119 (located at the corner of College and Wall Street in New Haven) for an interesting and highly relevant debate concerning the future of copyright law.

This year’s conference is taking place October 7-10, 2009 in Milwaukee, WI and is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information and Yale ISP alumnus Michael Zimmer, now a professor at the I-School.

AoIR member and ISP Executive Director Laura DeNardis is presenting a new paper “A Case Against Internet Address Markets.” This paper examines new ideas about address exchange markets as a mechanism to temporarily extend the life of the IPv4 address space. New market-based approach have great pragmatic appeal, but DeNardis envisions that this could create a longer term set of problems for the Internet’s technical architecture and Internet governance structures and have unintended social and economic consequences.

Come listen to Jimmy Wales talk about Wikipedia, its purpose, its criticisms, and its place in the academic/human sphere! Ask him questions! Rant your rants! Sing your praises! But definitely come out—if Wikipedia has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of people can make cool things happen. Also that Sir William Smith (1813 – 1893) was a distinguished English lexicographer.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Frank Pasquale, Yale ISP fellow, Loftus Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School, and associate director of the Gibbons Institute for Law, Science & Technology. “Beyond Competition and Innovation: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.” This presentation proposes institutions for “qualified transparency” within the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to fill a regulatory gap concerning articulated principles of editorial integrity in search engines and net neutrality for Internet carriers. Qualified transparency respects legitimate needs for confidentiality while promoting individuals’ capacity to understand how their reputations—and the online world generally—are shaped by dominant intermediaries.

Christine Greenhow, Yale ISP fellow, University of Minnesota Postdoc, Harvard Ed.D.  “Youth, Niche Social Media, and ‘Learning’” Education scholars rarely consider “informal learning” in youth-initiated, self-sustaining online spaces. This talk will showcase one experiment in ‘public media 2.0’ that intersects new media, citizen journalism and education: a topic-focused, niche social media publication launched within Facebook and designed to engage youth (16-25) in environmental issues. We look in particular at knowledge development, digital literacy practices, community formation, and real-world activism as indicators of effective engagement in the content. Implications for new media and education designs will be discussed.

Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer in the Whitehouse’s Open Government Initiative, was even more explicit – saying that “the dream here is that you have a grad student, sifting through these datasets at 3 in the morning, who finds, at the intersection of multiple datasets, insight that we may not have seen, or developed a solution that we may not have thought of.”

This is an extraordinary vision. This discussion comes hot on the heels of a debate in Congress regarding the level of information they are willing to release to the public in advance of voting on a bill. Last Wednesday CBS reports, with regard to the health care bill, that “[t]he Senate Finance Committee considered for two hours today a Republican amendment — which was ultimately rejected — that would have required the “legislative” language of the committee’s final bill, along with a cost estimate for the bill, to be posted online for 72 hours before the committee voted on it. Instead, the committee passed a similar amendment, offered by Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.), to put online the “conceptual” or “plain” language of the bill, along with the cost estimate.” What is remarkable is the sense this gives that somehow the public won’t understand the raw text of the bill (I noticed no compromise position offered that would make both versions available, which seems an obvious solution).

The Whitehouse’s efforts have the potential to test this hypothesis: if given more information will people pull things out of context and promulgate misinformation? The Whitehouse is betting that they won’t, and Kundra does state the Whitehouse is accompanying dataset release with efforts to provide contextual meta-data for each dataset while safeguarding national security and individual privacy rights.

This sense of limits in openness isn’t unique to governmental issues and in my research on data and code sharing among scientists I’ve termed the concern “Taleb’s crticism.” In a 2008 essay on The Edge website, Taleb worries about the dangers that can result from people using statistical methodology without having a clear understanding of the techniques. An example of Taleb’s Criticism appeared on UCSF’s EVA website, a repository of programs for automatic protein structure prediction. The UCSF researchers won’t release their code publicly because, as stated on their website, “We are seriously concerned about the ‘negative’ aspect of the freedom of the Web being that any newcomer can spend a day and hack out a program that predicts 3D structure, put it on the web, and it will be used.” Like the congressmen seemed to fear, for these folks openness is scary because people may misuse the information.

It could be argued, and for scientific research should be argued, that an open dialog of an idea’s merits is preferable to no dialog at all, and misinformation can be countered and exposed. Justice Brandeis famously elucidated this point in Whitney v. California (1927), writing that “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Data.gov is an experiment in context and may bolster trust in the public release of complex information. Speaking of the Data.gov project, Noveck explained that “the notion of making complex information more accessible to people and to make greater sense of that complex information was really at the heart.” This is a very bold move and it will be fascinating to see the outcome.

Cross posted on Victoria Stodden