The paper offers an account of how the meaning of the concept of “invention” and “inventorship” is not stable and predefined but rather constructed during patent disputes. In particular, I look at how that construction takes place in adversarial settings like the courts of law. I argue that key notions of intellectual property law like invention and inventorship are as constructed as technoscientific claims are in laboratories. Courts should thus be seen as sites of construction through processes framed by specific discursive and evidentiary technologies like bureaucratic paperwork, literary technologies, historiographic accounts of inventorship, and models of artifacts and devices. I draw my examples from the British disputes of the Marconi Company concerning the patenting of wireless telegraph and radio communication technologies in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper tracks Marconi’s circulation of publications, models, historical reconstruction of inventions, and expert witnessing. It unravels the material, discursive, textual, and evidentiary constructions of legality.

中文翻译：

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马可尼的法律斗争：话语、文本和物质纠葛

该论文解释了“发明”和“发明权”概念的含义是如何不稳定和预先定义的，而是在专利纠纷中构建的。我特别研究了这种结构在法庭等对抗性环境中是如何发生的。我认为，知识产权法的关键概念，如发明和发明权，就像实验室中的技术科学声明一样构建。因此，法院应被视为通过由特定的话语和证据技术（如官僚文书工作、文学技术、发明史记载以及人工制品和设备模型）构成的过程构建的场所。我从 20 世纪上半叶马可尼公司关于无线电报和无线电通信技术专利的英国纠纷中举出我的例子。该论文追踪了马可尼的出版物、模型、发明的历史重建和专家证人的流通情况。它揭示了合法性的物质、话语、文本和证据结构。