This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugène Soleau (1852–1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.

这篇文章是关于一个日常的纸制品：一个信封。然而，与大多数其他扁平纸容器不同，信封 Soleau只能从巴黎的 L'Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) 购买。花费 15 欧元，您将获得一个穿孔的双隔间信封，让您可以构成创作证明并为您的想法或项目指定精确的日期。但是信封索洛不仅仅是一种简单而廉价的方式，您可以通过这种方式证明在任何创意领域中的优先级。它是一个物质足迹，与数个世纪以来与披露和保密相关的实践有关，是进入知识产权体系基础设施及其与其声称拥有的知识形式的复杂关系的门户。本文的目的是将信封 Soleau的制作视为一种官僚文件，一种执行特定类型法律文书工作的物质设备。在四个不同的小插曲中，文章跟踪了信封 Soleau的材料形成作为证据容器，从回到现代早期的保密和优先实践开始，继续将其合并为两项专利（1910 年和 1911 年）给发明者 Eugène Soleau（1852-1929 年），并最终在 2016 年非物质化在 e-Soleau 中。作为一份官僚文件，信封 Soleau展示了一个普通的纸质物体可以执行多少工作，导航特定的物质（获得专利的双层信封）；正式的证明程序（如果穿孔具有法律意义）；双重存档（在机构中和与个人）和严格的时间限制（十年）的做法。最终，信封 Soleau 在物质和非物质之间、私人和公共之间、保密和公开之间，以及我们认为的知识产权制度的外部和内部之间穿行。